Former Japan Top Bureaucrat Sugita Dies at 84

Tokyo, Dec. 22 (Jiji Press)--Kazuhiro Sugita, who was Japan's longest-serving deputy chief cabinet secretary with a tenure of eight years and nine months, has died, it was learned Monday. He was 84.

Sugita held the top bureaucrat post from the start of the second administration of former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe in December 2012 to the end of the administration of Abe's immediate successor, Yoshihide Suga, in October 2021.

A native of Saitama Prefecture, north of Tokyo, Sugita graduated from the Faculty of Law at the University of Tokyo and joined the National Police Agency in 1966. He served as head of the agency's Security Bureau, Japan's first cabinet intelligence director and deputy chief cabinet secretary for crisis management.

During his record 3,205-day tenure as deputy chief cabinet secretary, he also served from August 2017 as chief of the Cabinet Bureau of Personnel Affairs, which manages appointments for senior posts in government ministries and agencies.

As NPA security bureau head, he led the agency's response to the Aum Shinrikyo doomsday cult's 1995 sarin nerve gas attack on the Tokyo subway system. He was deputy chief cabinet secretary for crisis management at the time of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks in the United States.

[Copyright The Jiji Press, Ltd.]