OSAKA -- Political pressure has forced an Osaka City University graduate school to reconsider whether to allow Kiyomi Tsujimoto, who resigned from the House of Representatives in scandal, to participate in a campus workshop, the school said Thursday.
A nine-member group has begun discussing whether to have Tsujimoto, who helped establish the nongovernmental organization Peace Boat in 1983, participate in a workshop on nonprofit organizations, the university said.
The session will be part of a course to be offered at the graduate school in April.
School officials said the issue is a matter of academic freedom and that they intend to take their time to deal with the issue carefully.
The university has received letters of protest from ruling Liberal Democratic Party-affiliated members in the Osaka Municipal Assembly as investigations into her alleged misuse of secretaries' salaries are ongoing, the school said.
On her Web site, Tsujimoto, former policy chief of the Social Democratic Party, wrote that she initially felt hesitant about taking part in the workshop after she quit the Lower House last March, but later decided to accept the university's invitation.
Tsujimoto's sudden fall from grace was widely publicized as she had been aggressive in an earlier Diet probe surrounding disgraced Lower House lawmaker Muneo Suzuki.