TOYAMA (TR) — The Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications filed a criminal complaint with the Toyama Prefectural Police on Tuesday against a Toyama City official suspected of fabricating national census data.
According to Toyama TV (Sep. 29), the aim of the unnamed official was to artificially inflate the city’s population.
The unnamed official is accused of violating the Statistics Act while administering the 2025 national census, which recorded demographics as of October 1 of that year.
According to the complaint, the municipal worker illicitly tampered with household survey registries that had been prepared and submitted to the city by local census takers.
Specifically, when field investigators struck households from the records after confirming they had “no actual residents,” the official allegedly reinstated them without any factual basis.
By counting these vacant properties as active homes, the official is suspected of cooking the books to deliberately boost Toyama City’s official population count.
