Since the regular Diet session opened in January, members of Prime Minister Shinzo Abe's Cabinet have been embroiled in a series of gaffes and problem behaviors, adding to the administration's woes over the suspicions surrounding the Osaka-based school operator Moritomo Gakuen.
The fiasco over the daily activity logs of Self-Defense Force troops deployed to South Sudan — which the Defense Ministry initially refused to disclose by claiming that they had been "destroyed" — highlighted the lack of grasp of the SDF operations by Defense Minister Tomomi Inada. Justice Minister Katsutoshi Kaneda was unable to answer questions from opposition lawmakers about the meaning of key provisions in the "conspiracy crime" legislation, leaving a Justice Ministry bureaucrat to give the answer to the Diet instead.
Takeshi Imamura, minister in charge of reconstruction from the Great East Japan Earthquake, indicated that people who had voluntarily escaped from the disaster at Tokyo Electric Power Co.'s Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant do not qualify for government support because those people, who remain hesitant to return to their hometowns despite the government's policy of trying to promote the residents' return, evacuated at their own responsibility. He made such a statement even though Tepco, which caused the triple meltdowns at the plant, has not been held criminally liable for the disaster and has only fulfilled its civil liability in limited ways.