Japan Press Weekly

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2013 October 2 - 8 [POLITICS]

Assemblypersons’ overseas study tours were ‘pleasure trips’: court rules

The Tokyo High Court ruled on September 19 that assemblypersons’ overseas study tours paid by Yamanashi Prefecture were “private tours for sightseeing”, ordering the governor to request the assembly members to return their travel expenses to the prefecture.

The cases brought into court specify four study tours made by 11 assemblypersons. All the places they visited were popular tourist sites, for example: the White House, the Statue of Liberty, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in the United States; the Great Pyramids in Egypt and a cruise at the Bosphorus in Turkey; the Blue House in Seoul; and Yakusugi Land in Yakushima Island, Japan.

The court decision stated that these were private excursions in the guise of overseas study tours and totally unrelated to duties as an assemblyperson. It also pointed out that the information attached to an “observation report” the participants submitted to the authorities were those available even in Japan. In addition, the judgment sharply criticized the assembly members for making it appear as if they saw somebody in person in the U.S., who they did not in fact meet.

Japanese Communist Party member of the prefectural assembly Kogoshi Tomoko is the only assemblyperson who has consistently demanded the abolition of the so-called overseas study tour program. In her question at the assembly on September 30, she said, “The high court issued a landmark ruling in line with the common sense of ordinary people. The governor and the assemblypersons should forgo appealing to the Supreme Court.”

Yamamoto Daiji, representing a civil group that filed the lawsuit to seek the return of the travel expenses, said, “Most of the general public feel it is wrong to spend taxpayer money in this manner. The governor and the assembly should accept the court decision and abandon the idea of appealing the decision to a higher court.”