Dogs and Demons_ Tales From the Dark Side of Japan - Kerr [70]
An example of marunage is the New Development Materials Company, an enterprise in the purview of the Ministry of Posts and Telecommunications (MPT). Anyone who has been awarded a contract to build a new post office must order materials through this company, although its business is entirely marunage – it simply channels orders to the suppliers that the builder would have used anyway. The contractors who design new post offices do not particularly mind, however, as there are only four of them and MPT employee funds own most of their stock. MPT has dozens of other profitable marunage subsidiaries, such as Japan Post Transport, which subcontracts the job of collecting letters from mailboxes and delivering them to post offices. This explains why the post office charges some of the world's highest postage rates. In recent years, postage rates have risen so steeply that people send letters to Hong Kong in bulk and have them re-posted to Japan one by one. International airmail from Hong Kong is cheaper than the domestic post.
The shell game goes on. Just as MOF found a way, via Zaito borrowings, to remove much of the budget from the overview of the Diet, individual ministries have found ways to raise money on their own account, thus bypassing MOF. A favorite technique is to establish a gambling venue from which the ministry takes a share of the proceeds via a koeki hojin. Thus the Transport Ministry has ¥6.6 billion at its disposal earned from boat racing, while MITI rakes in ¥16 billion from auto and bicycle racing. The police, meanwhile, make sums that dwarf those of all other ministries combined from their involvement with pachinko.
What happens to all this money is a mystery. In the case of MITI, the subsidiaries that handle the gambling earnings do not publish the names of the agencies to which they distribute the money. The official reason is that the United States might sue Japan at the World Trade Organization if it learned that MITI was subsidizing certain industries. The real reason is that most of the money flows to comfortable amakudari nests, such as the Industrial Research Center – the recipient of roughly $1 million a year for each of its twenty-three amakudari employees – for no work that anyone has been able to discover. A disgruntled MOF official remarked, «[Racing money] is not checked by MOF. It's MITI's pocket money. It's a warm bed of privilege that MITI will guard to the death.»
On the day the Bastille fell in 1789, Louis XVI went hunting and had a rather nice day; the news of the fall of the Bastille meant very little to him. In hindsight, we know that it was one of the pivotal events in world history and that it cost the king his head. But on that day hunting took priority, and in the evening the king wrote in his diary: «Aujourd'hui rien,» "Today, nothing."
The Japanese bureaucracy does not realize that the Bastille has fallen. When a reporter from the Nikkei Weekly pointed out that the value of the collateral on which banks granted their bad loans – mostly land – had dropped to the point that the banks can never recover the principal, a senior official at the Banking Bureau scoffed that it was, after all, «just collateral.» He went on to say, «There is enough cash flow for most companies to make payments on these loans, especially with current low interest rates.»
As we have seen, corruption in MOF is widespread and well documented. Scandals in 1997 and early 1998 resulted in a public raid of MOF's offices by police investigators, and two suicides, not to mention lots of salacious details about no-pants shabu-shabu. Yet, in an interview by the Mainichi Daily News in February 1997 concerning the bribery scandal of Nakajima Yoshio, the recipient some years earlier of $600,000 from the EIE Corporation, Sakakibara Eisuke (then vice minister of MOF) responded that this had been «emotionally magnified,