The ruling Liberal Democratic Party vowed to get to the bottom of and remedy the pension system fiasco and start efforts in 2010 to amend the war-renouncing Constitution as part of its campaign pledges unveiled Tuesday in the runup to the July House of Councilors election.
The LDP will focus on the pension mess because of plunging voter approval ratings for the Cabinet of Prime Minister Shinzo Abe over the government's pension management and other scandals involving his administration, political sources said.
The party is pledging a quick response to the Social Insurance Agency's pension record-keeping snafu. Among the 155 items on the campaign pledge list, the LDP is vowing to complete within a year the cross-checking of about 50 million unidentified pension premium payment records with information on some 30 million current pensioners to see if any match.