Following the Paper Trail to the “Boss”

Sunazawa and Miyaki focused their attention on the payment slips relating to the political activities of this LDP faction chairman—considered to be the assembly’s effective boss. The slips showed that eight public reporting sessions on municipal government affairs had been held in fiscal 2013 (April 2013 to March 2014), with as many as 300 citizens in attendance at each. The reimbursements were for the printing of handouts, and all the receipts were from the same printer. But the two journalists thought that both the number of meetings and the reported attendance levels seemed suspiciously high.

Around this time, Miyagi received a tip that Nakagawa was getting blank receipts and filling them in to claim falsified expenses. To check this out, he examined the user records at the municipal community center reported as the site of one of the public sessions, but there was no record of such a session. On August 18, Sunazawa and Miyagi directly asked Nakagawa about this discrepancy. Nakagawa brushed off the question, saying the meeting was held at a restaurant and that the handouts had indeed been printed. But the owner of the restaurant said that no such meeting had been held there on that date. The following day, Tulip TV reported this story as a scoop on its evening news program.

On August 30, Nakagawa resigned from the assembly, and the following day he held a press conference. There he admitted that he had filed for improper reimbursements using pads of blank receipts that he got from a printer he knew. (Subsequent investigations revealed that he had cheated the city of some ¥7.87 million in this way over the past five years.) Declaring, “I’m a person who can’t say no to an invitation,” he explained that he had used the money to pay for drinking sessions.

Assembly Members Fall like Dominoes

On September 1, Tulip TV reported another scoop, revealing malfeasance by Taniguchi Toshikazu, an LDP assembly member close to Nakagawa. The clue was that he had been filing for reimbursements using receipts from the same printer as Nakagawa. When questioned, he frankly acknowledged his wrongdoing, explaining that he had used the blank receipts at Nakagawa’s request to pad the amounts of his actual printing expenses and handed over the excess to Nakagawa in cash.

Tulip TV’s office building (left) and members of the local broadcaster’s news production team in a meeting after the evening news program on December 5.

The investigative campaign heated up after this. Tulip TV received the reimbursement records for fiscal 2014 on August 16 and for 2015 on October 17. Other media organs also filed for disclosure of the information, and by late August they caught up with Tulip TV in the receipt of the relevant documents.

Katagiri at Kitanippon Shimbun recalls the media competition: “As of July we had scooped the story of political activity fund misuse by one prefectural legislator. Though we did a lot of investigating directed at the prefectural assembly, we were unable to find anything further. But the Toyama municipal assembly was different: The more we looked, the more dirt we found. The national dailies also sent lots of reporters to Toyama to beef up their own investigations, and we had an ongoing race to be first to break new revelations.”

Journalists going through the documents found many records written in the same hand, suggesting that somebody had been filling in blank receipts. They also found many in which the numbers seemed to have been rewritten to inflate the amounts. And when they checked the documentation for reported inspection tours by assembly members, they found one case where reimbursements were granted for a totally fictional tour. As a result of the revelations, 10 members of the assembly, including the chairman, stepped down in September, and the total number of resignations eventually reached 14. In December 2016 the assembly repealed the reimbursement hike that it approved back in June.

Timeline of Developments in the Toyama Municipal Assembly Scandal, April–November 2016

April 11 Assembly chairman presents mayor with request for hike in assembly members’ monthly compensation from ¥600,000 to ¥700,000–¥730,000. Mayor indicates he will submit the request for review by council.
May 10 Compensation council meets behind closed doors to consider request.
13 Compensation council holds second meeting, votes to recommend approval.
19 Council chairman presents approval recommendation to mayor.
31 Tulip TV files request for disclosure of political activity reimbursement records for all assembly members from fiscal 2013 through fiscal 2015.
June 1 City submits bill to assembly for hike in members’ monthly compensation to ¥700,000.
9 LDP faction chairman Nakagawa Hideo obstructs coverage by reporter from Kitanippon Shimbun.
15 Assembly approves compensation hike.
July 13 Kitanippon Shimbun scoops suspected fund misuse by prefectural legislator Yago Hajime.
15 Tulip TV reporter Sunazawa Satoshi receives copies of 4,300 reimbursement slips for fiscal 2013 from the city, 45 days after filing for disclosure.
August 19 Kitanippon Shimbun scoops suspected fraudulent expense claims by Nakagawa.
30 Nakagawa resigns from assembly.
September 1 Tulip TV scoops collusion with Nakagawa by assembly member Taniguchi Toshikazu.
Subsequent revelations of improper claims push 10 additional members to resign by October 3.
November 6 Voters elect 13 new members in a by-election to fill an existing vacancy and seats of 12 who resigned.
Two members subsequently resign after the by-election, bringing total number to 14.

On December 30, Tulip TV broadcast a documentary covering the course of developments and summing up the news reports on the case. The program exposed the gap between the impressive front the assembly presented and the lack of substance behind it, revealing the true nature of the assembly and the collusion between its members and the city government.