Dogs and Demons_ Tales From the Dark Side of Japan - Kerr [61]
Departments lower in the food chain need to curry favor with those higher up, which requires that officials practice settai with one another as well. Government bureaucrats spend billions of yen every year to wine and dine functionaries from other agencies. In this rich stream of slush funds, they have found ways to pan for gold – overbilling and charging for fictitious trips and nonexistent functions that cost prefectural governments millions of dollars a year.
Bureaucrats alone have the power to issue permits, and permits do not come cheap, as may be seen in the following example from the sports-club business. In the 1980s, although relatively new to Japan, sports clubs attracted the interest of men working in the Ministry of Health and Welfare (MHW) and the Ministry of Education. They saw ways of enriching themselves through the time-honored techniques of giving mandatory lectures and study sessions, issuing facilities permits, and creating credentials and «levels» for sports-club professionals; agencies staffed by amakudari would administer the study sessions and permits, as the social critic Inose Naoki has described. Nothing better illustrates the baroque structures Japan's bureaucracy.
First, the MHW created the Foundation for Activities Promoting Health and Bodily Strength, which licensed two categories of workers: «health exercise guides» and «health exercise practice guides.» The MHW and the Ministry of Education then jointly sponsored a Japan Health and Sports Federation, which granted permits to the first category, while the MHW alone founded a Japan Aerobics Fitness Association, which granted permits to the latter category. Not to be outdone, the Ministry of Education set up a Japan Gymnastics Association, which devised two credentials for Sports Programmer at the First Level and Sports Programmer at the Second Level. To gain a First Level certificate, an aerobics instructor has to pay ¥90,000, for the Second Level ¥500,000. In addition, something called the Central Association for Prevention of Labor Disabilities requires the instructor to attend twenty days study sessions-at a cost of ¥170,000-before obtaining a permit to be either a «health-care trainer» or a «health-care leader.» In short, if you want to teach aerobics, you must run the gamut of four agencies and pay for six permits. No laws explicitly require them, but nobody dares do business without at least some of these permits. The fees do not go back to the public purse but straight into the pockets of the amakudari who run the permit agencies.
With regulations earning so much money for bureaucrats, it is no wonder Japan has become one of the most heavily regulated nations on earth-former prime minister Hosokawa Morihiro once said that when he was the governor of Kumamoto he couldn't move a telephone pole without calling Tokyo for approval. Yet these regulations have created a strange paradox: they are a priori and exist solely on their own terms – they do not necessarily make business honest and efficient, products reliable, or citizens' lives safe.
The key to the paradox is that the regulations control but do not regulate in the true sense of the word. Industries in Japan are largely unregulated. There is nothing to stop you from selling medication that has fatal side effects, dumping toxic waste, building an eyesore in a historic neighborhood, or giving investors fraudulent company statements. But just running a noodle shop requires you to fill out lots of forms in triplicate, with stamps and seals. The point of Japan's red tape is bureaucratic control – the restriction of business to routine paths along