A public corporation official on loan from the scandal-hit Finance Ministry and a high school teacher are among a group of five men arrested on suspicion of buying and possessing amphetamine stimulants, police said March 19.
The official was identified as Takashi Hata, 42, a division chief in the Tokyo office of the state-run Honshu-Shikoku Bridge Authority, which manages bridges linking the country's largest and smallest main islands -- Honshu and Shikoku.
The teacher was identified as Yuji Ogata, 37, who teaches English at a private senior high school in Tokyo. The three other suspects are Masakazu Unno, 38, an office worker, Fumihiro Iida, 42, a figure skating coach, and Yuji Tajima, 34, unemployed, police said.
Vice Finance Minister Koji Tanami expressed surprise March 19 over the arrest. "I was very surprised to even think that such a thing could happen," Tanami told a regular news conference.
Investigators said the five men, who all live in Tokyo, got to know each other through a telephone club for homosexuals around December and had started using amphetamines since then.
Police said they were tipped off by another person they arrested in a separate case. All of them have admitted the allegations, police said.
Hata bought about 1 gram of the drug Dec. 12 for 25,000 yen from Unno, who told police that he bought the drug from a foreigner in his neighborhood, the police said. Investigators found 0.9 gram of the drug at Hata's home in Nakano Ward on March 18, the investigators said.
Hata was employed in 1974 at the ministry's Kinki Local Finance Bureau, according to the ministry. Earlier this year, four Finance Ministry officials and a director of the state-run Japan Highway Public Corp., who was a former career Finance Ministry official, were arrested on suspicion of taking bribes from commercial banks and brokerages.