Inter-agency meetings on the extent of government support for people affected by the Fukushima nuclear disaster were never recorded, and their proceedings were kept effectively secret from the public, the Mainichi has learned through a freedom of information request.
The Reconstruction Agency held a number of high-level meetings with other agencies and ministries concerned with the nuclear disaster support law, but chose not to release any information about the meetings so as not to “invite public misunderstanding or unwarranted speculation,” an agency official stated. In fact, details suggest that the agency chose not to reveal that the meetings were even happening.
The Reconstruction Agency released its basic support plan on Aug. 30, which covered 33 municipalities in Fukushima Prefecture. The agency was originally going to determine eligibility for government support based on a set standard for local radiation. The agency chose to select municipalities eligible for government support without drawing up such a standard, however — which has drawn criticism that the area covered by the plan is “unfairly narrow.”
Reconstruction Minister Takumi Nemoto has stated that this support plan “was arrived at in consultation with related ministries and agencies,” hinting at pivotal meetings that took place among division directors and policy counselors as the plan took shape.
The Mainichi filed a freedom of information request for the minutes of these meetings in early July, more than a month before the basic support plan was released by the Reconstruction Agency.
The agency responded on Sept. 4 with eight pages of documents detailing the times, places and attendees at four meetings in April through June. The Mainichi was told, however, that minutes of these conferences “do not exist.” Furthermore, the agency refused to release some 120 pages of documents presented by related government offices for consideration during the meetings, stating that the material was “of a preliminary nature and would invite public misunderstanding and unwarranted speculation.”
According to the agendas and other sources, the meetings were convened at the behest of the Reconstruction Agency, and included division directors and policy counselors from the Environment Ministry, the Cabinet Office’s disaster victim support team, and the Nuclear Regulation Authority (NRA). The director-general for the Reconstruction Agency and the NRA’s vice-chief were also on hand during at least one occasion.
The nuclear disaster victim support law guarantees that victims’ opinions will be taken into account, and that all discussions will be made transparent. Furthermore, the government has been in hot water before for keeping meetings related to the nuclear crisis secret, after it was found at the beginning of last year that proceedings of the Cabinet Office’s nuclear disaster response headquarters had also gone unrecorded. The government’s public document management committee, meanwhile, demanded in April 2012 that minutes be kept of all meetings related to the March 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake.
The Reconstruction Agency has failed to heed this call, however — at least in the case of its inter-agency meetings over the nuclear disaster support law. On its failure to record minutes of the meetings and its refusal to release related documents, the agency told the Mainichi, “the law on public document management does not require meeting minutes and other documents to all be recorded in the same way. The meetings in question were not held to make final decisions, but were simply information exchanges.”
The Cabinet is set to formally adopt the basic nuclear disaster victim support plan after the public comment period ends on Sept. 13. The Reconstruction Agency is scheduled to hold public information sessions on the plan in the city of Fukushima on Sept. 11.
Mainichi Shimbun, September 6, 2013