The Foreign Ministry may have doctored an in-house document in a bid to discredit lawmaker Muneo Suzuki and a senior official close to him, according to a copy of the original document recently obtained by Kyodo News.
Suzuki, a House of Representatives member from Hokkaido, left the ruling Liberal Democratic Party in March due to a series of scandals. He was arrested earlier this month on suspicion of receiving a 5 million yen bribe from a local logging company in 1998.
Suzuki is known for having exerted influence over the Foreign Ministry, especially on Japanese diplomacy toward Russia, including the territorial dispute over four islands off Hokkaido, his constituency.
In March, the Japanese Communist Party released the document in question to a Diet panel as evidence that Suzuki and Kazuhiko Togo, a former Japanese ambassador to the Netherlands who was later sacked, were pushing ahead with an approach that was inconsistent with the Japanese government's position on the territorial dispute between Tokyo and Moscow.