Four opposition parties agreed Tuesday to jointly submit a resolution to the House of Representatives urging ruling bloc lawmaker Kenshiro Matsunami to resign after a scandal linking him to a gangster broke last week.
The Democratic Party of Japan, the Liberal Party, the Japanese Communist Party and the Social Democratic Party made the decision after their Diet affairs representatives held a meeting to discuss a course of action with regard to Matsunami.
The opposition camp wants the resolution on the 56-year-old Matsunami, a member of the New Conservative Party, to be submitted Wednesday and adopted Thursday in a Lower House plenary session. The NCP, which has 14 members, is the smallest member of the three-party bloc.
Speaking to reporters after the meeting, Yoshihiko Noda, who chairs the DPJ's Diet Affairs Committee, said he and other opposition representatives agreed it is "unforgivable, on both political and moral grounds" for Matsunami to have had any links to a gangster.
Noda also said it would also be irrelevant to have Matsunami appear before the Deliberative Council on Political Ethics in the Lower House to explain his side of the story.
Matsunami said last week that he had allowed a construction firm with ties to a gangster to pay 2.75 million yen as part of the salaries of two of his secretaries between March 1997 and February 1998. He said he stopped the payments after learning that the firm's chairman belonged to an organized crime group.
Although the NCP stripped him of all party posts, it stopped short of asking him to give up his seat.
His posts included deputy Diet affairs chief of the NCP.