Democratic Party lawmakers say email messages allegedly sent to eight senior education ministry officials in September suggest that an internal document linked to an influence-peddling scandal involving Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and school operator Kake Gakuen is authentic.
One of the emails, copies of which were obtained by the DP and released to the media on Friday, appear to show that an official from the ministry's Technical Education Division shared the document in question with eight other officials as an email attachment.
The document, the details of which were first reported by the Asahi Shimbun on May 18, quoted Yutaka Fujiwara, a senior official in the Cabinet Office, as saying that "the highest-level officials" at the Prime Minister's Office want to create the "shortest possible schedule" to allow Kake Gakuen to open a new veterinary medicine department at a university on Shikoku in April 2018.