OSAKA –

The ongoing controversy surrounding Moritomo Gakuen took a new turn this week when a recording emerged of a meeting between the former head of the Osaka nationalist school operator and a Finance Ministry official.

The recording is of a March 2016 meeting where former head Yasunori Kagoike and the ministry are negotiating over a piece of property on which his elementary school was being built. The rental agreement was described by the official as a special case, while Kagoike indicated that Prime Minister Shinzo Abe's wife, Akie, had heard about his negotiations for the site.

The recording was obtained by Kyodo News and other Japanese media outlets from freelance journalist Tamotsu Sugano, who has closely followed the Moritomo case and apparently won Kagoike's trust.

Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga and the Finance Ministry said Wednesday they were unaware of the details of the recording and declined to comment.

To date, senior Finance Ministry officials have testified in the Diet that records of the Moritomo real estate meetings were disposed of in accordance with internal rules, and that the official who met with Kagoike responded appropriately.

On March 11, 2016, buried waste was discovered on the site of Moritomo's new elementary school in Toyonaka, Osaka Prefecture. Moritomo Gakuen had been renting the land in question — valued at around ¥956 million — because it could not afford to purchase it from the government.

The recorded meeting, attended by Kagoike and his wife, Junko, took place four days later on March 15. They discussed the additional costs of cleaning up the land and who would pay. At one point, Kagoike indicated that Akie Abe, who had spoken at a Moritomo-run kindergarten in September 2015, had heard about the problem.

On her Facebook page last month, Akie said that Kagoike had called her and left any number of short messages. However, she said that she'd heard nothing about the specifics of the rental agreement.

On March 24, 2016, eight days after Kagoike's meeting with the Finance Ministry, the school operator decided to purchase the land. The agreement was concluded on June 20 and the land was purchased for only ¥134 million, after the government knocked ¥800 million off the price. The discount was allegedly due to what it would cost to clean up the buried waste.

But with officials claiming there were no records of the negotiations, and the Abe administration, the ministry and Akie Abe all denying Kagoike's claims, it remains unclear what really happened and why.

On Thursday, a group of Osaka-based lawyers and legal experts led by Tokuo Sakaguchi launched a campaign to pressure the Finance Ministry to establish a third party to investigate the deal and seek any records of the negotiations.

"The government and the bureaucrats have been trying to obscure the issue. But people are not convinced. We'll do all that's possible, legally, with the aim of getting to the truth," Sakaguchi said at an Osaka news conference.