TOKYO, Feb. 5 (Xinhua) -- Japan's opposition party camp on Tuesday, in ongoing parliamentary deliberations pertaining to the labor ministry's flawed jobs and wages surveys resulting in the release and use of erroneous statistics, has shown that last year wages dropped when the ministry reported otherwise.
Opposition party representatives, including President of the Democratic Party For the People, Yuichiro Tamaki, have, based on their own calculations, concluded that monthly real-term wages predominantly declined in the January-November period of last year.
This is in stark contrast to the official labor ministry's statistics showing that wages, ostensibly, rose in the same recording period.
Health, Welfare and Labor Minister Takumi Nemoto, whose resignation has been called for by the opposition camp to take account for his ministry's faulty labor surveys and shady internal data gathering methodology and accepted practices, conceded that the wages in the reporting period may well have declined, contrary to his ministry's data based on erroneous data gathering.
Nemoto is now under pressure from the opposition camp to justify the results of the wages calculations that were made following legitimate protocols in data gathering and calculations, only to say that the ministry is looking into the matter with experts.
Yasuyuki Onishi, a director-general for statistics and information policy, was dismissed from his post on Friday by Nemoto, to account for his mishandling of the official governmental surveys.
The opposition camp wants Onishi to appear in parliament as an unsworn witness to give testimony over the ordeal, which has led to diminished public trust in the labor ministry and the wider central government.
The opposition camp are strongly insinuating that there has been a monumental cover-up by the ministry and top bureaucrats involved in collecting, collating and releasing the key data on jobs, wages and benefits payments.
