A government advisory panel has postponed its decision on whether to approve the opening of a new veterinary science school next April at a university run by Kake Gakuen, the school operator at the center of favoritism allegations that involve Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and his close aides. The education ministry panel tasked with screening plans to open new universities and departments was set to make the decision by the end of August, but is now likely to put off the decision until later in the year. Since suspicions have intensified over the government process that dealt with Kake Gakuen's plan to open the new school inside a special deregulatory zone in Imabari, Ehime Prefecture, the ministry should make public the discussions held by its panel to quell further doubts over whether the plan is being equitably handled by the Abe administration.

Suspicions of government favoritism for Kake Gakuen, which is headed by Abe's longtime friend, came to the fore after education ministry documents surfaced of exchanges between the ministry's officials and the Cabinet Office held last year. Some of the documents quoted senior Cabinet Office officials as citing "the prime minister's intent" for approving the opening of a veterinary science department — which has not been approved for the past 50 years — in pushing the reluctant ministry to expedite the process. Kihei Maekawa, former administrative vice education minister, told the Diet in July that he also faced pressures from the Prime Minister's Office and the Cabinet Office, and that administrative decisions had been distorted on the matter.

The Abe administration insists that Kake Gakuen's plan — which was endorsed by a government conference on special deregulation districts in January — meets the four conditions the government set in 2015 for opening of a new veterinary science school: (1) that a new school should implement an idea other than the nurturing of conventional veterinarians at existing schools; (2) that there are concrete demand as in the field of life science to which veterinarians should respond; (3) that existing schools cannot cope with such demand and (4) that demand for veterinarians in recent years and the nationwide situation should be taken into consideration when a plan for a new veterinarian science school is examined.