Senior bureaucrats' lavish dining with Suga's son under probe

Well it didn't take long for the Suga scandals to begin piling up...

Another day, another political scandal in the making.

These people don't even try to hide their crimes...why should they when they know they won't be punished...

In the meantime, they'll let the rest of us "eat cake".

I require jail immediately until we find proofs in ... 18 months at least ...

It's not cake we are going to eat. The nepotism and corruption is getting more and more blatant My wife has given up expecting anything from the government but tax rises for us and pay rises for them.

Seriously, are there any young people who are in a position to make decisions and lead this country? Or is Japan caught in a world of old bureaucrats, patting each other on the back and keeping this country from going forward?

Well, it’s always funny when they use the word probe in the instances.

I doubt the probe will be very long!

This is exactly what happens when the system in place fails to jail the elite and senior politicians in office or long after they have served. Any one else would be jailed and prosecuted heading to prison right about now. The posh elite seem to get more rich and powerful at the expense of the people's backs. Time for good ol fashioned justice to come back.

Justice ⚖ please.

Complaining out of luxury...lol In 95% of other areas in the world you would be simply shot or beaten dead or thrown into a dirty prison hole for many years. It’s not everything nice, it’s not at all perfect, but you should thank heaven for how extraordinary good you still have it here.

Again only the very tip of the iceberg.

Well it didn't take long for the Suga scandals to begin piling up...

Suga it's been less than 2 months in power... just 2 months!

Ah, politics are the same everywhere it seems. Every child of every major politician somehow is in a high paying job that needs some government interaction. A shame my kids just had to go search for a job on there own.

investigated at the Internal Affairs and Communications Ministry

Well, if we're going to police ourselves... who's for Ginza?

First round's on me! (Just kidding, don't forget the receipt, and taxis home to Tachikawa)

Like father, like son and I am betting that they were not eating tofu...

*four senior officials were taken to posh Tokyo restaurants and given gifts by Suga's eldest son, who works at a company operating satellite broadcasting services, between October and December last year. *ITS obvious the posh restaurant and the dinner was noting but a meeting to discuss political favors for the company he works for and to enrich is family for generations to come. Sounds familiar!!!

It increasingly looks as if Suga is being cast adrift with the obvious withdrawal of support months out from the party’s next leadership ballot. To the party heavies, his faithful service under Abe now counts for little and we can expect the white anting and damning with faint praise to continue. He’s a dead man walking and it ain’t pretty to watch. Until his engineered demise has run its course, he could render us all a service by calling for a thorough cleansing of the putrid Augean stables in order to lay the groundwork for a true 一新.

Can't any of these greedy, utterly useless cockroaches called politicians go a single day without doing something stupid?

"If there were indeed acts that violated the National Public Service Ethics Law, that could damage people's trust in national public servants,

What trust? You can't damage anything if there's nothing to damage. The trust o meter is below zero for politicians in this country.

and the Justice Ministry will take measures accordingly," Kato added.

Like actually prosecuting people and throwing them in jail? As if.

"We will take appropriate measures after investigating what happened," the statement said.

Yeah, just as I thought. You will do nothing. Wanna bet?

@oyatoi: "... To the party heavies, his faithful service under Abe now counts for little ....": Why should it count for anything, if he's not competent to run the country? The problem with one-party rule is that the role of PM, or any other sort of minister, is awarded out of a notion of entitlement, not merit. (That is, when ministers aren't being selected in order to cripple their careers.) The cynicism of the party heavyweights isn't that they're now casting him adrift: it's that they selected him to begin with, since no one else wanted to be held responsible for the pandemic crisis.

A cynicism with a slightly different nuance was behind making Kono Taro minister in charge of vaccinations: since it was obvious he (or anyone else) would fail and thereafter bcome the object of resentment, the appointment was a way of preventing him from becoming PM anytime soon. Clever -- though it would have been nice if they'd chosen someone who could actually help us all to get vaccinated.

What the two cases have in common is that ministers were chosen for the most important roles in the government during a pandemic solely on the basis of intraparty concerns. Actually putting the government in the hands of people competent to help us who live in Japan never occurred to them.

If self serving concerns are the culmination of decades of LDP rule then the system needs a complete overhaul.

Start with cutting all the politicians over seventy years of age and introduce an electronic forum for citizen participation and voting on issues.

Reform!

Yoshinori Akimoto

He said he paid it back and I believe him. However, how did he know how much it was?

What else is new??