Dogs and Demons_ Tales From the Dark Side of Japan - Kerr [63]
Just as leftist writers in the 1930s were so in love with the «dictatorship of the proletariat» that they were unwilling to admit the brutal reality of Stalinism, so mainstream Western commentators have kept up a long love affair with Japan's bureaucracy. As recently as 1997, Ezra Vogel of Harvard University, the author of Japan as Number One, described Japan's «elite bureaucracy» as one of its distinctive strengths, which «compare very favorably around the world.» «Japanese civil servants enjoy the priceless advantage of the moral high ground,» Eamonn Fingleton wrote in his book Blindside, which aimed to show «why Japan is still on track to overtake the U.S. by the year 2000.» «Their actions,» he continued, «will be judged only in terms of how well they serve the overall national interest. Their objective is to achieve the greatest happiness of the greatest number of people. Moreover, they take an extremely long-term view in that they seek to represent the interests not only of today's Japanese but of future generations.»
In the 1980s, the Ministry of International Trade and Industry (MITI) was the darling of foreign commentators; today, that honor goes to the Ministry of Finance. «MOF men truly are Nobel caliber,» continued Fingleton adoringly. MOF men are «brilliant, creative, tenacious, public spirited.» They have «not only grit and technical brilliance but an uncommon sense in reading people and their needs.» Unlike the «greed-is-good» West, «MOF today is living proof that top officials can be 'rightly oriented in their own minds and hearts.' » This is due to «pride in a distinctive (and distinctively masculine) way of life, a concern to earn the good opinion of comrades, satisfaction in the largely symbolic tokens of professional success.» What could be more attractive, more worth emulating in other countries? Nevertheless, the greedy machi bugyo of the Lord Mito series, sitting in his embroidered kimono eating off fine gold lacquer, represents a cold fact of bureaucratic life: corruption. It's a genteel, smoothly organized, even institutionalized, form of corruption, so endemic as to be called «structural» and thus not usually seen as corruption as we ordinarily understand it.
The sad reality is that the Japanese bureaucracy thrives on shady money: in small ways by cadging extra expenses with falsified travel reports; in larger ways by accepting bribes from businessmen and as favors from organized crime. Shady money is the oil that greases the wheels of Japan's smooth-running relationship between the bureaucracy and business, and that features in the expensive practice of settai.
The bureaucratic scandals that periodically rip through the Japanese media are efforts, as van Wolferen points out, to rectify outrageous excess, but they do nothing to address the structural corruption that is the normal state of affairs. In 1996, for example, newspapers revealed that Izui Jun'ichi, the owner of an Osaka oil wholesaler and a «fixer» in the Japanese oil business, had spent more than ¥75 million on wining and dining government officials, including forty-two from MITI and thirty from MOF, reaching all the way up to MITI's vice minister, Makino Tsutomu, and MOF's vice minister, Ogawa Tadashi. MITI, stung by these fierce press reports, investigated 138 employees and reprimanded six top officials. A former vice minister of the Transport Ministry, Hattori Tsuneharu (in the amakudari position of president of the Kansai International Airport), had received from Izui ¥4.9 million in cash, gift coupons, a bar of gold, and an expensive painting. (Paintings, easy to hide and difficult to value, are gifts of choice.) Izui was also reported to have given a painting worth several thousand dollars to Wakui Yoji, the chief of the MOF Secretariat – in exchange for