The Abe administration is facing public criticism over the shady discount sale of a government-owned plot of land to the Osaka-based school operator Moritomo Gakuen. It is indeed weird that the land was sold to Moritomo Gakuen at a steep discount after earlier bids by other parties, such as the local city government of Toyonaka and other school operators, to buy the plot failed as the state insisted on higher prices.
It is also unnatural that the director-general of the Finance Ministry's Financial Bureau, upon repeated questioning in the Diet, insists that documentary records of the negotiation with Moritomo Gakuen were destroyed when the land sales contract was concluded — since it is the culture of Japan's government bureaucracy to keep those kinds of documents.
It's the job of the Diet and prosecutors to unravel the suspicions about the deal. They need to do it without political considerations. At the same time, this scandal is interesting in relation to politics in that it exposes the quality of the conservative forces in this country. In Japan, the distinction between conservatives and right-wingers is blurry, and no consensus exists over the continuity and rupture of history.