TOKYO, May 25 (Xinhua) -- A former education ministry official admitted Thursday documents existed which indicated Prime Minister Shinzo Abe's involvement in a government decision to approve the heavily-subsidized opening of a veterinary school in a university run by one of his friends.
Kihei Maekawa, former vice minister of Japan's Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology, told a press conference in Tokyo that the documents shown earlier by the main opposition Democratic Party mentioning Abe's "will" in connection with opening of the veterinary school were genuine.
"Those documents were shared by senior officials while I was in office," said Maekawa.
Japan's top government spokesperson, Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga, however, said that the education ministry had not confirmed the existence of such documents.
Japan's opposition parties have asked Maekawa to be brought to the Diet to give unsworn testimony, while the ruling coalition parties resisted the call.
The Japanese government in January gave its approval for establishing a new veterinary medicine faculty in a National Strategic Special Zone in Imabari, Ehime Prefecture.
Kake Educational Institution, headed by Kotaro Kake, a close friend of Abe's, submitted the only application for the program after other institutions were forced to bow out by strict regulations.
After Kake Educational Institution was selected for the project in a meeting held between the central and local governments in the special strategic zone in Ehime, the local city assembly opted to provide the land to the institution to build the new department for free.
Imabari, the second-largest city in Ehime, had initially acquired the land for some 3.68 billion yen (33 million U.S. dollars).
In addition, local government also decided to provide up to 9.6 billion yen (85.8 million U.S. dollars) to the educational institution as a subsidy for construction costs.
Japan's main opposition Democratic Party showed recently documents that suggested Abe's involvement in the government decision.
Democratic Party lawmaker Yuichiro Tamaki said at a lower house committee meeting that the document suggested that the education ministry was told by the Cabinet Office that the choice for the new school "was heard to have been the prime minister's wish."
According to reports by The Asahi Shimbun, a well-read newspaper in Japan which has also obtained the same documents, one of the documents quoted officials of the Cabinet Office as telling education ministry officials: "With the major precondition of opening the faculty in April 2018, a schedule to allow for the shortest time period possible to make such an objective possible should be drawn up and shared...... This is something passed on from the highest levels of the prime minister's office."
Another document said, "We understand that (this) is the intent of the prime minister."
Japan's education ministry wrapped up a probe into the documents on May 19, saying that it could not confirm their existence.
A public opinion poll released by Japan's Kyodo News two days later however, showed that 77.0 percent of respondents remained unconvinced with the government's explanation that it could not confirm the existence of the documents.
The latest claim follows Abe, his wife and other ministers being embroiled in an as yet unresolved cut-price state land deal with another private school operator in Osaka.
Moritomo Gakuen, the operator of a nationalist school in Osaka, said it had received a donation and the backing from Abe to open a new school on a piece of land owned by the government and sold to the operator for just a fraction of its appraisal value.
