YYYYYEEESSS, Kato did the art, and huge thanks to Shikigami for such a quick translation! I think this confirms that Masato Kato definitely worked on the Ninja Gaiden NES series as "Runmal." Ah, Kato, my entire childhood under your videogame tutelage...
Seriously. After Mario, I went straight into Ninja Gaiden, then Chrono Trigger, then FF7, then Xenogears, then Chrono Cross. And he was involved in all of those projects. Oh, except Mario.
As for a potential release of the scans, keep in mind that these are copyrighted images, and to scan the entire book and just release it would deprive Square Enix of some amount of Chrono revenue. What we'll probably do is make "scanlations" like what Shikigami did and release only translated images that contain new storyline information publicly. There's no way we'll get every single page of this baby scanned, and certainly no way we'll get it all translated.
Of course, this is all subject to how ZeaLitY wants to handle it, but this is what I predict will happen.