A Japanese government panel is investigating claims that senior education ministry bureaucrats lobbied a prestigious university to give a retired colleague a job.
Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga told a news conference Wednesday that the Cabinet Office's re-employment oversight committee is "continuing an inquiry" involving the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology.
The committee was established after the law on public servants was revised in 2007 to curb the practice of amakudari ("descent from heaven"), in which retired bureaucrats land cushy jobs at entities they formerly supervised. The practice has been criticized as leading to corruption.