The ruling and opposition camps grappled on Monday over a proposal to expand an overtime work system, with the opposition suggesting the government deliberately manipulated a survey to make it look like the system could improve the nation's chronic overwork problem.
Monday's session of the House of Representatives Budget Committee was briefly halted amid heated debate after labor minister Katsunobu Kato apologized for the "inappropriate" survey in 2013, which he said compared data measured using two different methods.
Prime Minister Shinzo Abe had used the data in the same committee late last month in support of expanding the discretionary labor system. After the reliability of the data came into doubt last week, he retracted his remark and apologized.