Abe apologises amid cronyism scandal
Sagawa's testimony is expected to shed light on who ordered the documents to be altered; to what extent the ministry was involved; and whether Abe, his wife Akie, and other politicians exerted an influence on the tampering and the land sale.
The row has battered Abe's popularity and called into question whether he can still win a party leadership contest this September and become Japan's longest-serving prime minister.
The controversy over the sale of the state-owned land in Osaka Prefecture to Moritomo Gakuen, a nationalist school operator with ties to Akie, was reignited earlier this month after the Finance Ministry admitted that it had falsified its settlement documents.
Mr Abe has seen his support ratings nosedive more than 10 percentage points across different media polls this month, since the Finance Ministry confessed on March 12 that entire sentences and paragraphs were deleted from the 14 documents.
Kagoike, indicted for alleged subsidy fraud and now held at a detention center in Osaka, also insisted that the nationalist group received a donation of ¥1 million from the prime minister's wife, as he testified in the Diet a year ago.
The government had sold the land to Moritomo for only one-seventh of its appraised value to build an elementary school, and Mrs Abe was to be its honorary principal.
The opposition says Sagawa's testimony "is only a first step towards revealing the whole truth" about the scandal.
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"This problem has shaken the people's confidence in the administration", Abe told the convention.
Kiyomi Tsujimoto of the main opposition Constitutional Democratic Party of Japan criticized the testimony as "betraying the public expectations".
The 5 opposition parties have been united in their response to the scandal.
Protesters urged Abe to resign, as riot police kept tight security outside the venue of his ruling party's annual convention, at which the premier stressed his intention to revise Japan's pacifist post-war, US-drafted constitution.
Several times past year, Sagawa told MPs the price of the land "was properly calculated" and stressed there was no evidence of political pressure in the sale. He also testified that the ministry had discarded the negotiation records. The documents were doctored before being disclosed to lawmakers previous year.
Japan's steel industry is anxious that the United States is using new import tariffs on steel and aluminium as a card for wider trade negotiations, the head of the industry's group said on Monday.
But on Tuesday, Sagawa brushed aside such a view, saying, "I don't think I have changed my Diet remarks in the wake of the prime minister's comment".
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