All major Japanese newspapers ran big headlines Tuesday about the Finance Ministry's alterations to documents related to a shady 2016 sale of state-owned land, threatening to sink public support for Prime Minister Shinzo Abe's government. The way in which they described the latest developments, however, was anything but uniform.
The difference was too big to ignore. Some dailies opted to say the ministry "falsified" the documents involved in the sweetheart land sale to nationalist school operator Moritomo Gakuen, while others said it "rewrote" the papers.
Major liberal newspapers — the Asahi Shimbun, the Mainichi Shimbun and the Tokyo Shimbun — used the word "falsification" in their headlines. The corresponding Japanese is "kaizan," which connotes an outright wrongdoing and has been widely used by opposition lawmakers in their denunciation of the government.