Dogs and Demons_ Tales From the Dark Side of Japan - Kerr [69]
To see where all the Zaito money went, one must step boldly into the swamp of bureaucratic finance. The breeding habits of tokushu hojin are remarkable: ninety-two tokushu hojin, grouped under various ministries, have spawned thousands of koeki hojin, of which the central government oversees 6,922 and regional governments 19,005. Amakudari run most of the koeki hojin associated with the government, while ex-officials and employee welfare funds of the various ministries own a major portion of their stock. The koeki hojin in turn breed grandchildren, owned by the same people: full-fledged private profit-making enterprises that, without having to make public bids, gain a large share of public-works contracts. The various corporations fall under the jurisdiction of different ministries, which use them like.cattle to be milked. MITI sponsors a herd of 901 hojin, the Ministry of Education 1,778. All these hojin feed on Zaito money. Their breeding ground is the ministries that oversee them. They have no natural predators. Their droppings take the form of huge pellets known as monuments.
At the top of the list is the Highway Public Corporation, Doro Kodan, the largest of all the swamp creatures, king of the jungle. To build and manage Japan's highways, it has an operating budget of ¥4.4 trillion, roughly half of which comes from road tolls and other highway receipts; Zaito borrowings supply the rest. (The Highway PC is in fact Zaito's single largest borrower.) Over the years, the Highway PC has sunk into a quagmire of unrepayable debt; its cumulative red ink had come to well over ¥20 trillion by the end of the century. At this level, it rivaled even the notorious Japan National Railroad debt (¥28 trillion) and by 2002 might even surpass it. This desperate financial situation lies behind the high tolls, such as the ¥1,700 charge to drive for three minutes over the bridge to the New Kansai Airport.
The management of highways has its profitable side, however-the operation of service and parking areas along the freeways, with their attendant food and drink concessions, as well as telephone and car-radio monopolies. These monopolies lend themselves to schemes whereby bureaucrats make money for themselves. Here's how it works: The Highway PC creates a koeki hojin known as the Highway Facilities Association, which owns and manages the thousands of service and parking areas and has annual revenues of ¥73 billion, making it Japan's seventh-largest real-estate company. For this it pays the Highway PC only ¥7 billion in fees (less than 10 percent of revenues); the rest goes to the amakudari who run it. In turn it contracts out the work of operating the service areas and parking areas to agencies whose qualifications are that ex-bureaucrats from the Highway PC and the Construction Ministry employee-welfare funds own most of their stock. These companies have combined sales of ¥545 billion and employ 26,000 people, almost three times more than the number employed by their grandfather, the Highway PC. Add in the sales earned by the Highway Facilities Association, and the earnings of these subsidiaries come to more than ¥600 billion annually, a large part of which is pure profit, since the Highway PC awards cushy bloated contracts with no public bidding.
What all these numbers tell us is that the retired bureaucrats from the Construction and Transport ministries who run the Highway PC have neatly removed the profits in road management from the Highway PC's budget and funneled them into their own pockets. Every time the Highway PC builds a new highway, the public pays high tolls, shouldering the burden of paying off the Zaito debt, while the bureaucrats profit from new service- and parking-area concessions. Therefore it is imperative to build more and more highways.
Everywhere you look, you find parasitic tendrils sucking nourishment from the flow of Zaito money. The favorite technique is marunage, «tossing it