Dogs and Demons_ Tales From the Dark Side of Japan - Kerr [64]
Part of MOF's admirably «masculine way of life» involves enjoying the fun at hostess bars and other sleazy venues that are paid for by banks' settai budgets. In September 1994, Dai-Ichi Kangyo Bank treated Miyakawa Koichi, the chief of MOF's Inspectors' Office, to an evening at a «no-pants shabu-shabu» restaurant, featuring waitresses in the nude from the waist down. Miyakawa was so grateful that he let the bank people know about a surprise inspection due to take place the next day. A cartoon in a weekly magazine showed a devil at the gates of hell consulting his notebook and commenting, «For a bureaucrat from Japan's Ministry of Finance to sell his soul for no-pants shabu-shabu and yakitori, that's really cheap!»
That these scandals are chronic, not mere flukes in an otherwise honest system, is obvious not only from the sheer number of officials involved but also from their seniority. In the government ministries, a politician takes the largely ritual top position as minister, while true executive power lies with the senior career bureaucrat, the vice minister. Vice ministers from all major ministries have been implicated in recent settai and bribery scandals, and then the takings extend downward in diminishing amounts. For example, Okamitsu Nobuharu, the vice minister of Health and Welfare, was arrested in December 1996 for receiving more than ¥100 million in gifts and favors from Koyama Hiroshi, a developer of nursing homes subsidized by his ministry. At the same time,Wada Masaru, in a lesser position as the ministry's councilor, received ¥1 million from Koyama, and other officials further down the line benefited in various degrees from settai. The MHW, anxious to avoid further public scandal, carried out an in-house investigation and later fined or reprimanded sixteen employees.
Where in the past decade, in Europe, America, Malaysia, or Singapore, could we find a bureaucrat convicted of the ¥100 million garnered by MHW vice minister Okamitsu? Or the $600,000 paid by Takahashi Harunori, the president of real-estate company EIE Corporation, to Nakajima Yoshio, the former vice director of MOF's Budget Bureau in 1991? Such are the takings of those who have the «priceless advantage of the moral high ground» and stand as «living proof that top officials can be 'rightly oriented in their own minds and hearts.' »
One feature of MOF's superior moral quality is its links with organized crime. Under MOF's guidance, gangsters play a large role in Japan's financial system. In 1998, another scandal broke with the news that Dai-Ichi Kangyo Bank, one of Japan's top-ten commercial banks, extended collateral-free loans of ¥30 billion to Koike Ryuichi in 1989 so that he could buy stocks in Nomura Securities and other brokerage firms. Koike was in a business unique to Japan known as sokaiya, which is the disturbance of shareholder meetings by asking difficult questions. In other countries, people who ask hard questions at shareholder meetings are simply stockholders, but in Japan they are usually extortionist gangsters. Most large companies try to conclude their annual meetings in less than an hour, so sokaiya is a considerable threat. The answer is to pay the gangsters off. Nomura paid Koike as much as ¥70 million to keep quiet, and later it was revealed that all the other top stockholders and major banks had paid Koike as well.
The fact that officials enrich themselves at public expense is not considered to be more than a minor evil in Japan and the rest of East Asia, because people expect these same officials to manage the resources of the state in a wise and efficient manner. There is an ongoing debate in East Asia over the virtues of open, Western-style bureaucracy versus the paternalistic «crony-capitalism» found in Japan. Apologists for «crony-capitalism» admire the way that officials can easily and freely channel funds to pet industries and projects without having to engage in raucous policy