Japan FY 2018 Budget Enacted with Govt Mired in Scandal

Tokyo, March 28 (Jiji Press)--The Diet, Japan's parliament, enacted the government's 97,712.8-billion-yen budget for fiscal 2018 on Wednesday, at a time when the opposition camp continues to grill the administration of Prime Minister Shinzo Abe over a high-profile cronyism scandal. The fiscal 2018 budget, with spending set to hit a record high for the sixth straight year, was approved by a majority vote at a plenary meeting of the House of Councillors, the upper chamber of the Diet. It cleared the House of Representatives, the lower chamber, on Feb. 28. The annual budget will finance measures for a "revolution in human resources development," one of the Abe administration's key policy themes, including through the reduction of waiting lists for nursery school admission and the expansion of free-of-charge education. The budget also includes funds for introducing the Aegis Ashore land-based missile defense system and long-range cruise missiles. Following the budget's enactment, the Liberal Democratic Party-Komeito ruling coalition will focus on planned work style reform legislation, a special priority for the prime minister in the ongoing ordinary Diet session, scheduled to end on June 20. Abe aims to submit the work style reform legislation early next month and get it enacted during the current Diet session. But after the revelation of data flaws in a related labor ministry survey earlier this year, the government has given up on a plan for the legislation to allow fixed-overtime terms to apply to a wider range of jobs. The opposition camp is demanding that the government also refrains from seeking the introduction of a system to exempt high-income specialist workers from work-time regulations. Other key bills to be emphasized later in the Diet session include ones to regulate casino-featuring integrated resorts to be opened in the country, and to strengthen measures to prevent passive smoking. On the favoritism scandal involving nationalist school operator Moritomo Gakuen, meanwhile, Diet affairs chiefs from the Constitutional Democratic Party of Japan and five other opposition parties agreed on Wednesday to continue to demand sworn parliamentary testimony by Akie Abe, the prime minister's wife, and by former Finance Ministry official Hidenori Sakota. Akie Abe was once appointed honorary principal of Moritomo's then planned elementary school, while Sakota was head of the ministry's Financial Bureau when the bureau held negotiations with the group on a state-owned land plot for the planned school. In the scandal, the ministry admitted earlier this month that Financial Bureau officials had manipulated documents related to the sale of the land plot at a massive discount to Moritomo. LDP and Komeito officials agreed on Wednesday that the two parties will study the expanded use of electronic document approval systems within the government, as a measure to prevent document tampering. END