TOKYO - Was it plain coincidence or uncanny timing? On the same day that Japanese opposition lawmakers asked to see the guest list for a controversial spring garden party hosted by Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, the list was shredded by Cabinet Office employees.
Amid cries of deliberate subterfuge, Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga insisted that the government had nothing to hide and that it was just happenstance: heavy demand for the industrial-strength shredder means it must be booked way in advance. He also said that the back-up soft copy of the list "cannot be retrieved".
The spring garden party - a yearly government shindig held for VIPs like members of the diplomatic corps, business leaders and athletes - has been in the headlines for weeks. It was Japan's top trending topic on Twitter this month.
The party next year has been cancelled as the government said it will relook at how guests are invited, after allegations first emerged that the taxpayer-funded event was being tapped by Mr Abe to reward loyal voters from his ward in the western Yamaguchi prefecture.
Opposition lawmakers are baying for blood, noting that the shredder in question could dispose of 1,000 sheets of A4-sized paper within just 40 seconds and questioning the government's explanation.
In their own probe, they have dug up proof that "anti-social" forces - a term used to refer to those with yakuza triad links - had also scored an invite to the exclusive party.
Furthermore, it was found that the owner of Japan Life, the bankrupt multi-level marketing firm, who is now under police investigation for fraud, had used an invite to the spring party to boost his firm's credibility with prospective clients.
Domestic media have also pointed to lawmakers of the ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) quietly deleting photographs and other online traces of the garden party.
All this has begun to affect Mr Abe, who last month rewrote history as Japan's longest serving prime minister, and his two-month-old Cabinet.
A Nikkei-TV Tokyo poll last week showed his approval rating falling by seven percentage points to 50 per cent from October, while a Kyodo poll showed support dropping 5.4 points to 48.7 per cent.
Amid the controversy, LDP lawmakers have given up on their plan to discuss revising the Constitution in the current Diet session that will close on Dec 9, instead of asking for an extension that will buy the opposition more time.
And while a general election is not due until October 2021, talk is rife within LDP ranks that Mr Abe may well call a snap election early next year to renew his mandate and catch the opposition unawares. He did so in 2017 when he came under fire for two separate cronyism scandals.
Like in the previous two scandals, in which public records were either shredded or falsified, the latest garden party controversy has again cast a harsh glare on Japan's spotty track record with record-keeping.
While Mr Abe promised to tighten the reins after the two scandals, discretion is still left to each government agency on whether a public document is "important" enough to be retained or discarded after use.
The Asahi Shimbun, in a scathing commentary this week, said: "Whenever a scandal surfaces, the bureaucrats' go-to excuse is that all pertinent documents have been 'discarded' or 'cannot be located'."
Sophia University political scientist, Dr Koichi Nakano, concurred, telling The Sunday Times that he found it difficult to believe there was no available record of this year's guest list.
"Government employees work on computers, and the normal course of action is to save the file somewhere," he said.
"The public cannot possibly be expected to think that the guest lists are handwritten, or are drawn up from scratch every year without any past references."
