Apr 6 08:17 AM US/Eastern
TOKYO, April 6 (AP) - (Kyodo) — The Japanese Foreign Ministry said Tuesday that it has launched a panel to look into the issue of whether key documents related to the so-called Japan-U.S. secret pact on the introduction of nuclear weapons into Japan have been discarded.
The ministry also decided to establish, possibly in April, a new ordinance to enable diplomatic documents that have remained undisclosed for 30 years or more to be released to the public in principle, according to ministry sources.
The panel, headed by Foreign Minister Katsuya Okada, was set up after a former senior ministry official recently told the Diet about the possibility of documents having been scrapped before an administrative information disclosure law took effect in 2001, referring to what he heard from a person familiar with the inner workings of the ministry.
Kazuhiko Togo said that, while serving as the ministry's treaties bureau head from 1998, he sorted through 58 key documents related to the secret nuclear pact and other issues and turned them over to his successor, Shotaro Yachi.
There were 16 documents that he felt most important, but half of them have not been confirmed.
Okada told a regular press conference Tuesday he cannot say when the panel investigation would finish, but it would "not take (as long as) six months, or one year."
The panel includes two professors -- Katsuya Uga from the University of Tokyo and Sumio Hatano from the University of Tsukuba.
Uga is an expert in the field of information disclosure and Hatano was a member of another Foreign Ministry panel that conducted an investigation into the existence of the secret nuclear pact and three other secret agreements believed to have been reached in the Cold War era.
According to the investigation, the secret nuclear pact started to take shape amid negotiations on the revision of the Japan-U.S. security treaty in 1960 and effectively led Japan to allow port calls by U.S. vessels carrying nuclear weapons.
The agreement existed even though Japan has maintained since 1967 that it abides by three non-nuclear principles of not possessing, producing or allowing nuclear weapons on its territory.
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