Apr 7 05:18 AM US/Eastern
TOKYO, April 7 (AP) - (Kyodo) — The Tokyo District Court will hand down a ruling on a lawsuit Friday, in which 25 plaintiffs are demanding that the state disclose diplomatic documents relating to the 1972 reversion of Okinawa to Japan from U.S. control.
The suit has attracted considerable attention as the plaintiffs argue the three documents in question, which have already been declassified in the United States, indicate that Tokyo concluded secret pacts with Washington over financing the reversion.
The government, for its part, claims that the papers are not in its possession, saying they may have been discarded.
"I'm focusing on whether the government will present guidelines for improving Japan's information disclosure system and expanding the public's right to know," Keiichi Katsura, who leads the group of plaintiffs, said prior to the ruling.
One of the requested documents indicates that Japan secretly agreed with the United States to shoulder $4 million in costs to return plots of land used by U.S. forces to their original state as farmland.
The three papers, compiled between 1969 and 1971, were declassified by the U.S. government in the early 2000s.
Given that former high-ranking Foreign Ministry negotiator, Bunroku Yoshino, 91, testified in court in December that he initialed the document, Ikuko Komachiya, a Tokyo-based lawyer representing the plaintiffs, said, "There is no doubt that the ministry drew up the document. The point is whether the court accepts as reasonable the state's argument that it may have discarded it."
The suit was filed in March last year, after the foreign and finance ministries rejected requests by 63 people, including the plaintiffs, to disclose the documents, saying they did not have them.
The claimants argued that the state must possess the papers as they are official documents.
The plaintiffs include former Mainichi Shimbun reporter Takichi Nishiyama, 78, who was convicted in the 1970s for his reporting on Okinawa's reversion and whose court case to restore his reputation was thrown out by the Supreme Court in 2008.
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