Dogs and Demons_ Tales From the Dark Side of Japan - Kerr [34]
It is impossible to get through a single day in Japan without seeing some reference-in paper, plastic, chrome, celluloid, or neon – to autumn foliage, spring blossoms, flowing rivers, and seaside pines. Yet it is very possible to go for months or even years without seeing the real thing in its unspoiled form. Camouflaged by propaganda and symbols, supported by a complacent public, and directed by a bureaucracy on autopilot, the line of tanks moves on: laying concrete over rivers and seashores, reforesting the hills, and dumping industrial waste. Advancing as inexorably as the «Moving Finger» of Omar Khayyam, the bureaucracy carves its «concepts» upon the land, and neither our Piety nor our Wit shall lure it back to cancel half a Line, nor all our Tears wash out a Word of it.
3. The Bubble
Looking Back
Naturam expelles furca, tamen usque recurret.
(If you drive nature out with a pitchfork, she will soon find a way back).
– Horace
We are ready to take a look at the long financial travail Japan has been experiencing since 1990, the aftermath of wild speculation known as the Bubble. The meltdown of the stock market and property prices has wiped away assets worth $10 trillion, with another $3 trillion likely yet to go. These vanished assets are not trivial, for they make up one of the most grievous declines of wealth experienced in human history, the sort of loss that usually happens in war or at the fall of an empire. To see how Japan could have got itself into this incredible situation, we must go back to the heyday of Japanese financial power more than a decade ago.
When, toward the end of 1987, black limousines began lining UP each afternoon in front of Madame Onoe Nui's house in Osaka, the neighbors thought little of it. The cars disgorged blue-suited men carrying briefcases who disappeared inside, sometimes not to emerge until two or three the next morning. Nui operated a successful restaurant, and it appeared that she had expanded her dinner business into earlier daylight hours. Only later did the neighbors learn that Madame Nui's visitors were not coming for the good food. The men in blue suits were coming to pay homage to a shadowy resident of Nui's house, a figure later revealed to be the single most important player in the Japanese stock market at the time. He was Nui's pet ceramic toad.
Toads, as is well known, are magic beings that like badgers and foxes are adept at weaving spells, especially those involving money. People like to have as charms in their gardens ceramic statues of badgers with a jug of wine in one paw and ledgers of receipts in the other. Toads, though less popular, are more mysterious, as they can transform themselves into demon princesses, and they know ancient sorcery from China and India.
The blue-chip Industrial Bank of Japan (IBJ), Japan's J. P. Morgan, especially favored Madame Nui's toad. Department chiefs from IBJ's Tokyo headquarters would take the bullet train down from Tokyo to Osaka in order to attend a weekly ceremony presided over by the toad. On arriving at Nui's house, the IBJ bankers would join elite stockbrokers from Yamaichi Securities and other trading houses in a midnight vigil. First they would pat the head of the toad. Then they would recite prayers in front of a set of Buddhist statues in Nui's garden. Finally Madame Nui would seat herself in front of the toad, go into a trance, and deliver the oracle-which stocks to buy and which to sell. The financial markets in Tokyo trembled at the verdict. At his peak in 1990, the toad controlled more than $10 billion in financial instruments, making its owner the world's largest individual stock investor.
Madame Nui was also the world's largest individual bank borrower. «From the mouth of the toad,» she proclaimed, «comes money,» and she seems to have called considerable Chinese and Indian sorcery into play, for she parlayed