Satoru Ienishi felt overwhelming anger as he watched a newscast at his Tokyo office on June 13, 1998.
The report was telling him that what he and other HIV-positive hemophiliacs had sought in court did indeed exist -- a tape recording of the first meeting of the Health and Welfare Ministry AIDS research team in 1983.
"If they had made the tape public immediately (after the meeting), hundreds of people would not have died," recalled Ienishi, a plaintiff in the ensuing HIV scandal lawsuit and currently a Diet lawmaker.