TOKYO, June 25 (Xinhua) -- Japanese Defense Minister Takeshi Iwaya apologized yet again on Tuesday that new mistakes were found in explanation materials to Akita Prefecture, which is a candidate site for the land-based interceptor missile system Aegis Ashore.
Iwaya said at a press conference after the Cabinet meeting that transcription errors were found in the material that investigated the influence of the radar signal on the surrounding environment.
When transcribed to a table on the same page, the radio wave intensity of 0.0083 described on the report map was erroneously written as 0.0038. Another place where 0.0483 should be written is mistakenly written as 0.0438, according to Iwaya.
The minister apologized for the mistakes, saying they were unforgivable. However, he claimed that the investigation itself is correct and that the new mistakes do not affect the adequacy of deployment.
The apology came a week after Iwaya apologized to Akita Governor Norihisa Satake for the ministry's faulty geographical survey that was used to select the northeastern prefecture as a candidate site for hosting a U.S-developed missile defense system.
Iwaya said last week that the Defense Ministry will re-examine other potential sites in the northeastern region of Tohoku and consider using external experts for on-site measuring after numerical mistakes were found in peak elevation angles in the geographical survey calculated based on Google Earth map data.
