Cal State Bakersfield officials are in the middle of an international scandal involving a former student turned prominent Japanese politician who is facing allegations of resume padding.

Heavily accented Japanese reporters have flooded the university with calls to verify academic and athletic records of Japanese National Diet member Junichiro Koga. He's the equivalent of a member of Congress in the United States.

"I didn't understand a whole lot of what they were saying and I'm not sure they understood what I was saying," said Kevin Eubanks, Cal State's assistant sports information director. "They were very nice and very polite. It was impossible to get frustrated with them for not understanding me."

Koga has been under a cloud of allegations that he lied about his academic credentials during his November election campaign. Most of the debate surrounds whether he graduated from Pepperdine University and if he attended the University of California, Los Angeles. Japanese media have reported that neither claim is true.

Koga also claimed to have gone to Cal State, according to Japanese news reports.

Cal State spokesman Mike Stepanovich said the public affairs office had received two dozen calls from Japanese reporters plus e-mails requesting information on Wednesday and Thursday. The admissions and records department was getting the same treatment.

"I've been here seven years and this is a first for me, this attention from the international media, particularly the Japanese media," Stepanovich said.

Stepanovich confirmed that Koga was indeed a student there, for five academic quarters from January 1977 through June 1978.

Koga played on the Cal State tennis team and was a physical education major, an academic discipline not easily explained to some of the Japanese reporters, Eubanks said.

Cal State never awarded Koga a degree. Those answers weren't always sufficient for the Japanese journalists trying to break a juicy scandal, Stepanovich said.

"They ask, 'How do you know that he went there?'" and "Well, how do you know those (records) are accurate?"

Stepanovich laughed Thursday about the questions and said the university was trying to accommodate all the information requests. Japanese television crews are scheduled to be on campus today.

Stepanovich said reporters were asking if and when Koga was planning to come to Bakersfield. Stepanovich said he knew of no such plans.

Adam Yamaguchi, a news producer with Japanese television network TV Asahi, was at Pepperdine on Thursday working on the story.

Yamaguchi is an American who works at his network's Los Angeles bureau.

"It's definitely one of the top stories (in Japan)," Yamaguchi said. "It's illegal for someone of his stature to be padding his resume."

If proved, Yamaguchi said it could bring criminal charges and he said most media in Japan were already reporting that Koga lied.

"At the very least he would be forced to resign," Yamaguchi said.

He said Koga arrived in Los Angeles Wednesday, but has not spoken to media.

Yamaguchi said Pepperdine officials have said Koga attended there for four years but didn't graduate. UCLA had no enrollment record of him, Yamaguchi said, but his resume may have been referring to Cal State Los Angeles instead -- a detail lost in translation.

Sachi Kaneko, 23, a Japanese exchange student at Cal State, said she wasn't very familiar with Koga, who only recently rose to political prominence in Japan's leading minority political party.

But she said allegations of resume padding would be very serious to the Japanese people.

"I think it's going to be a big deal," Kaneko said. "People selected him. People trusted him. One lie and people won't trust him."