TOKYO: Customs bureaus in Tokyo, Osaka and Kobe allowed the import of asbestos into Japan between 2012 and 2016, with officials suspected of later asking importers to change their import declarations so they appear not to have included asbestos following Mainichi Shimbun inquiries, it has been learned.
While importing asbestos into Japan is generally prohibited under the Industrial Safety and Health Act, the Tokyo, Kobe and Osaka customs offices granted import permission in eight cases where items had been declared as containing asbestos. In all eight cases, the importers subsequently submitted requests to correct their import declarations to state different items, after the Mainichi Shimbun interviewed the three customs offices last year.
The import permissions were granted between September 2012 and April 2016. In September 2016, the Mainichi Shimbun reached the three customs bureaus to inquire about how and why the permissions were granted. The Mainichi went on to file an information disclosure request over the cases in December 2016.
The documents first disclosed by the three customs bureaus had both the names of the importers and the dates blacked out, and were accompanied by the firms’ requests to change the imported items into those not containing asbestos. After the Mainichi filed a complaint with the minister of finance, who oversees customs bureaus, the dates on the documents were released on the grounds that they didn’t deserve protection.
The updated documents showed that in two cases handled by the Tokyo and Kobe customs bureaus, the requests for corrections to the import declarations were submitted by dealers in January this year, after the Mainichi’s information disclosure request was filed. In the remaining six cases, such correction requests were filed over the month starting in late September 2016, after the Mainichi made inquiries into the cases. The period between the time when the import permissions were granted and when the correction requests were filed ranged from six months to over four years.
The three customs bureaus have not disclosed whether there were screening blunders and whether they had identified the actual import items, with an official saying, “We cannot answer about details of individual screenings.”
Yukiko Miki, head of the NPO Access-info Clearinghouse Japan and an expert in the information disclosure issue, noted, “It should be basic operating procedure to disclose documents that existed at the time an information disclosure request was filed. The background leading up to the declaration corrections is extremely unnatural, and it appears the customs bureaus tried to cover up their blunders.”
Due in part to an increase in the use of air parcel services in recent years, customs bureaus handle a huge volume of import declarations every day, possibly making the border controls sloppy.
According to Finance Ministry statistics, the number of import declarations in 2014 doubled from 2000 to some 23.52 million. However, the number of customs officers has remained almost the same.
One customs officer in eastern Japan confided to the Mainichi, “We are under this strong pressure that we shouldn’t stagnate distribution flows by spending too much time on screenings. In our screenings, the main focus is put on finding handguns and illegal drugs, and other restricted items such as asbestos tend to be overlooked.” The officer went on to say, “Even customs officers can’t get a handle on all the prohibited imports, and the screenings are carried out shoddily.”
One customs agent who handles import declarations commented, “It’s unnecessary to correct the names of items that have already been granted import permission, and such a practice is something unthinkable from the perspective of customs agents. I would guess the customs bureaus tried to cover up the screening mistakes.”