The Finance Ministry will do its best to discover whether there is a document related to a purported secret agreement on the cost burden for the 1972 reversion of Okinawa to Japanese sovereignty from U.S. control, Finance Minister Hirohisa Fujii said Friday.
"We will make efforts in a manner similar to the Foreign Ministry," although there are many difficulties, Fujii said at a news conference.
But he added that he believed the document "no longer exists," as the pact was said to have been signed in 1969 and official documents are not stored for more than 30 years.
Fujii also said it may be difficult as the negotiators who represented the ministry at that time, then finance chief Takeo Fukuda and top financial diplomat Yusuke Kashiwagi, are no longer alive.
A third-party committee consisting of six academics was set up by Foreign Minister Katsuya Okada Tuesday to review the ministry's probe into the alleged secret diplomatic pact. The committee plans to submit a report by mid-January.