Dogs and Demons_ Tales From the Dark Side of Japan - Kerr [55]
At Tokai's nuclear plant, Mitsubishi Motors, and Snow Brand, no worker or manager ever drew attention to a situation dozens or even hundreds of people must have been aware of for many years. Meanwhile, complacent officials meekly took the information they were served and never bothered to investigate. Multiply these stories by the tens of thousands and one begins to get a shadowy view of slowly accumulating dysfunction afflicting almost every field in modern Japan. From the outside, the machine of Kaizen still looks bright and shiny but inside, an accretion of bad information is gumming up the works.
On February 17, 1996, the Mainichi Daily News ran an article headlined «DA [Defense Agency] chief richest among Cabinet ministers,» and then listed his and other ministers' assets. However, they were not valued at actual market prices, ministers are not culpable if they give false reports, and the assets did not include business interests. In other words, the official numbers had near-zero credibility – yet the newspaper diligently computed rankings and averages for the group, and publishes similar rankings every year.
These small bits of misinformation pile up into mountains of misleading statistics, which lead government planners, businessmen, and journalists to very wrong conclusions. Journalists, beware – reporting on Japan is like walking on quicksand. Take an innocent-looking number like the unemployment rate. With unemployment hovering around 3 percent in Japan for most of the 1980s and early 1990s, it would seem that Japan's unemployment has been far below the 5 or 6 percent reported for the United States.
But was it really? Japan uses its own formula to calculate unemployment, with several important differences. For example, in the United States you are unemployed if you were out of work for the previous month; in Japan, it is for the previous week. While economists differ on the exact numbers, everyone agrees that the Japanese rate would rise by 2 to 4 percent if it were calculated in the American way. Japanese officials publicly admit that employment data are as unreliable as corporate balance sheets; in early 1999, Labor Minister Amari Akira, when pressed to provide realistic information, responded, «It's my corporate secret.» And yet – and this is the notable part of the story – journalists continue to use the Japanese unemployment figures and to compare them with the American ones without warning their readers that they are comparing apples and oranges. Karel van Wolferen writes: «Systematic misinformation is a policy tool in Japan. Unsuspecting foreign economists, especially those of the neo-classical persuasion who must be reassured that Japan, after all, is not embarrassing evidence contradicting mainstream theory, are easy targets... We simply do not know, even approximately, the level of unemployment, the amount of problem loans, assets and debts in most corporate sectors.»
Suppose you were a delegate at the Third UN Convention on Climate Control, which was held in Kyoto in December 1997. You would have been delighted to learn that according to a report issued by its Environment Agency, Japan spent a total of ¥11 trillion for projects aimed at averting global warming. However, if you took a closer look at the agency's report, you would have discovered that of ¥9.3 trillion labeled «finding ways to reduce emissions of carbon dioxide,» ¥8.35 trillion went into the construction and maintenance of roads. The Natural Resources and Energy Agency spent an additional ¥400 billion promoting nuclear energy. Of ¥1.2 trillion listed as spent for «preservation and enhancement of forests,» about half went into labor expended in stripping the native forest cover and replanting it with sugi monoculture and paying the enormous interest on debts piled up by the Forestry Agency in this ill-fated project. Money spent on solar- and wind-power generation came to only ¥90 billion. «The report is not ideal in terms of representing the current state of affairs,» an Environment