TOKYO (MNI) – Japanese Prime Minister Naoto Kan has allegedly
received political donations totaling over Y1 million in recent years
from a Korean national living in Japan as a permanent resident, the
Asahi Shimbun reported on Friday.

It follows the resignation of his foreign minister and aide, Seiji
Maehara, earlier this week after he confirmed that he had received
similar donations.

Kan’s fund-raising organization received Y1.0 million in donations
from the person in question in September 2006, when Kan was the acting
head of the then opposition Democratic Party of Japan, and another
Y20,000 in March 2009, Y10,000 in August 2009 and Y10,000 in November
2009, the report said.

The person in question, who is a permanent resident of Japan,
served as an executive of Chuo Shogin, a Korean financial institution,
until 2007, but made donations in his Japanese name, the daily reported.

Kan told an upper house committee on Friday that his office
confirmed about the donations and that he plans to return them to the
supporter.

“I thought he had a Japanese citizenship with his Japanese name. I
didn’t realize he was a foreign national,” Kan was quoted as saying by
Jiji Press and other media.

Japanese law prohibits contributions from “foreign” individuals or
entities to prevent foreign interference in domestic affairs, but a
series of incidents also reflects Japan’s war-time colonial rule of the
Korean peninsula.

Koreans who had been brought to Japan lost their Japanese
citizenship after World War II and their descendents have also been
denied citizenship.

Foreign Minister Seiji Maehara resigned on Sunday for an alleged
violation of the political fund law. Maehara admitted that he had
received a total of Y250,000 from a Korean national who is a permanent
resident of Japan.

The Korean woman who had made political contributions to Maehara’s
office told the Asahi Shimbun daily earlier that she had known Maehara
since he was in school and thus wanted to support him. She also said she
didn’t know that a political donation by permanent Korean residents in
Japan to Japanese politicians was illegal.

Maehara, who once led the Democratic Party of Japan when it was in
the opposition, was considered to be a top candidate to succeed Kan.

In another development, DPJ lawmaker Ryuichi Doi, who has close
ties with Kan, resigned from the lower house’s political ethics panel
after signing a document that called for abandoning the sovereignty of
islets that Japan and South Korea each claim as their own.

The content of the document contradicts the government’s stance on
the islets, known as Takeshima in Japan and Dokdo in South Korea.

The news came as Kan is struggling with a tumbling public support
rating due to growing concerns about his leadership. He is under
pressure from opposition parties to dissolve the lower house and call a
snap election.

The approval rating for the cabinet dropped to 19% in the recent
poll conducted on Feb. 19-20 by the Mainichi Shimbun newspaper, down
sharply from 29% in its January survey.

The reading was the lowest since the Democratic Party of Japan took
power away from the Liberal Democratic Party in September 2009. Declines
in support below the key 20% mark have often resulted in the resignation
of past prime ministers.

Kan took office in June last year from his predecessor, Yukio
Hatoyama, who resigned after his public support slumping to the 20%
threshold over broken promises on the relocation of a controversial U.S.
air base on the southern island of Okinawa and other issues.

The public had high expectations for Kan at the beginning of his
government because of his grass-roots activist background.

Kan has called for a tax hike to allow the government to secure a
stable funding source for additional public spending on job creation,
which would help Japan move out of stubborn deflation.

But his abrupt call for a sales tax increase to around 10% from the
current 5% during parliamentary election campaigns last year was partly
to blame for the DPJ’s loss in the upper house election in July.

The latest Mainichi poll also found that the disapproval rating for
Kan’s cabinet rose 11 percentage points to 60% following a minor
increase in January in the wake of the reshuffling of the cabinet. Some
60% of respondents said Kan should call a snap election.

tokyo@marketnews.com
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