Japan's Foreign Ministry will admit that a secret pact between Japan and the United States, which allows nuclear-laden US military vessels and aircraft to stopover in Japanese territory, does exist according to a statement made by the ministry on Saturday.

Following increasing allegations and mounting evidence that such a pact was in existence, Vice Foreign Minister Mitoji Yabunaka set up a task force in September to conduct a "full and comprehensive" investigation into the allegations.

The task force now headed by Foreign Minister Katsuya Okada and consisting of around fifteen ministry officials, has looked into some 3,200 in-house documents and 3,700 documents from the Japanese Embassy in Washington since Sept. 25. During Okada's in-house probe, documents have been found that corroborate the existence of the secret nuclear agreement, according to sources close to the matter.

Coupled with this finding, a former vice foreign minister recently came forward attesting to the Japan-US clandestine understanding, saying that he was privy to the minutes of the meeting in which the secret pact was made in 1960.

"I saw them. I remember we looked into them after something happened," the former top official, who served in key Foreign Ministry posts in the 1980s and 1990s, said on condition of anonymity.

The ex-official added he does not remember the exact incident that led him to view the minutes.

The minutes in question are currently being kept by the US government, according to declassified US documents.

''The probe is now in the final stage, and we will announce the outcome in January,'' Okada said Saturday, in a brief statement devoid of any details and negating Vice Foreign Minister Mitoji Yabunaka's pledge to issue a detailed report on his findings in November.

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Under the 1960 bilateral security treaty between the two nations, Washington is required to consult with Tokyo before any nuclear weapons are brought into Japan, however Japan's Foreign Ministry has now indicated that its recent probe into the documents has revealed that stopovers of US military vessels or aircraft with nuclear weapons are not subject to prior consultation.

According to former Japanese ministers and top bureaucrats at the Foreign Ministry involved with handling the deal, in revising the Japan-US Security Treaty in 1960 the two allies also made a secret agreement under which Tokyo would give tacit approval to Washington on the stopover of US military aircraft or vessels carrying nuclear weapons in Japanese territory.

Thus, Washington construed that any prior consultation with Tokyo would only need to be made in the case of the deployment of nuclear weapons on land or in the air and that stopovers of aircraft and vessels with such weapons were not bound by prior consultation.

According to former top ministry officials of the administration of then Prime Minister Nobusuke Kishi, who inked the revised security pact, the Prime Minister accepted the US interpretation of the new deal.

Hence it's could be deemed reasonable to assume that in light of the loophole in the 1960 treaty and amid mounting testimony from former high-level Japanese ministers, that such stopovers could have frequently been made by US military vessels, with nuclear payloads, over the past half-century.

Although the secret deal itself has already become known to the public by declassification of US diplomatic documents in the late 1990s, the former Japanese government led by the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), has consistently denied the existence of such a secret deal between the two countries, saying, "As we have never faced demands for prior consultations, we have no other choice than determining that nuclear (weapons) have not been brought into Japan."

Suffice to say if Washington has been acting under the assumption that stopovers were exempt from needing prior clearance, then it's of no wonder the ruling LDP government(s) at the time claimed that nuclear weapons were not being brought into Japanese territory by US military vessels -- but the facts, including recent testimony, suggest Japan's previous administrations have, for a long time, known otherwise.

Four former top Japanese ministry officials who have all served as vice foreign minister (the most senior bureaucratic post at the ministry) have all recently acknowledged that a secret pact has been in existence for decades, although perhaps the most compelling testimony comes from a former Foreign Ministry administrative vice minister, Ryohei Murata in a well-publicized interview with a Japanese national newspaper.

Ryohei Murata, a former Foreign Ministry administrative vice minister, told the Mainichi newspaper that Japanese and US governments have had a secret accord whereby Japan would tacitly approve port calls and passage through Japanese territorial waters by US warships carrying nuclear weapons.

Murata, who served in the position from July 1987 to August 1989, said the accord was reached in 1960, when the two countries renewed the bilateral security treaty.

Murata's testimony, that flies in the face of repeated LDP refutation of the matter, marks the first time a former administrative vice foreign minister has gone on record as saying such a deal has existed.

"My predecessor told me to convey the contents of the secret accord to the minister, in my capacity as the administrative vice minister."

Murata said that he did discuss the contents of the pact with the foreign minister at the time.