With time running short before the July 22 House of Councilors election, the explosive pension data debacle is looking to be the killer issue for Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and his disintegrating Cabinet.
If Abe fails to find and fix the root cause of the system's structural problems, his Liberal Democratic Party and coalition partner New Komeito are likely to suffer a major setback in the poll, and if so, mounting pressure on Abe to step down, experts said.
The Democratic Party of Japan's discovery that the Social Insurance Agency failed to keep track of 50 million pension accounts has deepened public concern over the already crumbling pension system. The problem widened this week after health minister Hakuo Yanagisawa announced Wednesday that the ministry has stumbled across an additional 14.3 million accounts on microfilm that were not put into the computers.