Dogs and Demons_ Tales From the Dark Side of Japan - Kerr [48]
As the Japanese economy sank lower and lower during the 1990s, each year the government announced rosy predictions for growth. Likewise, MOF has consistently downplayed the financial crisis, with Vice Minister Sakakibara Eisuke announcing in February 1999 that the crisis would be over «in a week or two.» The wolf is at the door, yet the government keeps crying «Sheep!» It is indeed precisely because MOF has been the Little Boy Who Cried Sheep that experts estimate bad loans to be two or three times higher than the government admits, and the true national debt to be as much as triple the official numbers. Ishizawa Takashi, the chief researcher at Long Term Credit Bank's research institute, says, «Even if we told the truth people would think there is more being hidden. So we put out lower numbers on the assumption people believe the true figure is higher.»
Nevertheless, there is much to be said for tobashi. Tobashi is a form of make-believe in which Japan's banks pretend to have hundreds of billions of dollars that they don't have. But, after all, money is a sort of fiction. If the world banking community agrees to believe that Japan has these billions, then it essentially does.
For the time being, tobashi seems to be working just fine. In any case, Japan's ministries have at their disposal a further «management of information» technique, perhaps the strongest: denial. Shiranu, zonsenu, means «I don't know, I have no knowledge,» and it is the standard response to most inquiries. We saw an example of this when Asahi TV questioned a section chief at the Ministry of Health and Welfare about dioxin pollution, and he responded, «I don't know, I have no idea.» A similar process was at work in the same ministry when for seven years its officials denied that they had any records of AIDS-contaminated blood products which had infected more than 1,400 people with HIV in the 1980s. In March 1996, however, when Health Minister Kan Naoto demanded that the «lost» records be found, they turned up within three days.
The writer Inose Naoki describes an encounter he had with officials of the Water Resources Public Corporation (WRPC), the special government corporation that builds and maintains dams. Inose inquired about a company called Friends of the Rivers, to which the WRPC had been awarding 90 percent of its contracts and most of whose stock was owned by WRPC ex-directors, and this is what the WRPC official told him: «Contracts are assigned by local units across the nation, so we have no way of knowing how many go to Friends of the Rivers. Therefore I cannot answer you.» «But isn't it true that many of your employees have transferred to Friends of the Rivers?» Inose asked. «Job transfers are a matter for each individual employee» was the reply. «If someone transfers in order to make use of his superb ability and expertise acquired while at the Corporation, it is his individual decision. The Corporation can say nothing about these individuals' choices.»
The Corporation «cannot answer you,» «can say nothing.» There is no recourse against this. In 1996, newspapers reported that auditors at government agencies turned down 90 percent of the public requests for audits during the decade from 1985 to 1994. And if a citizens' group presses too hard, documents simply vanish: this is what happened when citizens of Nagano demanded to see the records of the money (between $18 and $60 million) the city spent courting the International Olympic Committee in 1992. City officials put ninety volumes of records in ten big boxes, carried them outside town, and torched them. Yamaguchi Sumikazu, a senior official with the bidding committee, said the books had taken