Gift-Giving Tradition Abruptly Ends in Japan

Bring on the presents--but not for Japanese bureaucrats.

A string of blockbuster bribery and corruption scandals has put a chill on the traditional custom of businesses sending posh year-end gifts to their regulators.

With the symbiotic relationships between Japanese politicians, bureaucrats and businesses under scrutiny as never before and “bureaucrat bashing” approaching the status of a national sport, the once-haughty bureaucracy is keeping a low profile.

Some bureaucrats are too terrified to accept even calendars from the lobbyists who flock to the ministries each December to pay their respects and ask to be treated kindly in the New Year.

Two elite bureaucrats have been jailed and dozens more disciplined for accepting everything from bribes to free golf games and lavish hospitality from shady entrepreneurs. The survivors have been warned to stop accepting the largess of the industries they supervise.

“Yesterday we held our company year-end party, and not a single bureaucrat showed up. Not one!” said a senior manager at a major Japanese computer maker. “This is the biggest crackdown there has ever been.”

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On Friday, days before Christmas, the Japanese Cabinet approved a set of ethics guidelines for public servants. Among the no-nos on the list: allowing businesses to pick up the tab for meals, parties, sports or travel; accepting the traditional presents sent twice each year; accepting honorariums for speeches and publications; taking loans or stock options; and accepting the envelopes of money Japanese often present to those departing on trips or being transferred.

But plans for an ethics law were scrapped and details of enforcing the guidelines will be left up to each ministry and agency, so the net result is “weak,” the respected Nikkei Shimbun financial daily concluded.

Analysts predicted that the effects will be brief and cosmetic.

“People will just lay low for a while,” said Stephen Anderson of Tokyo’s Center for Global Communications. “If there’s no new law and no enforcement mechanism, the cycle of scandal will just start up again. . . . The structural corruption is so deep that there are many, many reforms they would need to pursue.”

Weak though they may be, the guidelines indicate that public tolerance of corruption has been eroded by incessant scandals, political upheaval and a feisty citizens movement to make government more open and accountable.

Japan’s gift-giving corporate culture is also being reexamined--especially the tradition of sending presents twice a year to express gratitude to valued customers, bosses and government patrons.

Each July and December, swarms of delivery trucks buzz through Tokyo’s congested streets to alight at the homes of politicians, government officials and corporate decision-makers. There they unload their bounty: whole fresh fish, iced oysters on the half shell, expensive whiskey, hothouse fruit, even whole bolts of fine wool packaged with a gift certificates that entitle the bearer to a tailor-made suit.

Tradition dictates that the gifts should be practical and inexpensive items such as soap, soy sauce or towels, worth no more than $20 or $30. But affluence has begotten gift escalation.

A 1995 survey by Sanwa Bank found the average o-seibo, or year-end gift, cost $55; upper-end gifts sent to VIPs can cost up to $500.

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This year, the o-seibo delivery season coincided with the arrest of Nobuharu Okamitsu, a top career bureaucrat at the Health Ministry, on charges of accepting $530,000 in bribes from a nursing home operator to whom Okamitsu had granted about $3 million in government subsidies.

With his arrest imminent, Japanese TV crews staked out Okamitsu’s apartment in a dingy, Soviet-style concrete-block building of subsidized housing for high-ranking bureaucrats.

While they waited, camera crews filmed the procession of packages arriving at the homes of public servants, and o-seibo suddenly became news.

The disgraced Health Ministry issued an edict: no more freebies, no more schmoozing and boozing with the folks under ministry supervision, and no more o-seibo.

“Totally prohibited means, literally, totally prohibited,” said a terse internal memo, as if to clear up any doubt that, unlike previous warnings, these rules were meant to be obeyed.

A 1979 federal regulation bars bureaucrats from accepting gifts or favors, but it has been widely flouted.

The unspoken understanding has been that bureaucrats may accept small tokens of corporate goodwill that are “within the bounds of common sense.” But those bounds seems to vary wildly from ministry to ministry, judging from the whispered reports of the wives who collect the loot.

For example, the wife of a bureaucrat at the modest Science and Technology Agency said she never received a single o-seibo until her husband did a stint in the steel division of the Ministry of Trade and Industry, or MITI, which wields vast authority over a huge number of industries. Then the gifts began pouring in.

Likewise, the wife of a senior administrator in a national hospital was shocked by the torrent of expensive gifts that arrived when her husband was assigned to the pharmaceutical division.

“I asked, ‘Is it really OK to accept all this?’ My husband said yes, and said there was a rule that it was OK to take things worth up to $500,” she said. “This year the guidelines went out saying we cannot accept anything--not even a dish towel or a calendar. . . .

“It’s ridiculous,” she said. “I’ve never bought a calendar before, but this year I’m going to have to buy one.”

During the “bubble economy” of the late 1980s, when it seemed that nearly everyone was getting rich, high-living bureaucrats did not loom large in the public eye. Now, some say that five years of recession have made citizens intolerant of public-sector excesses.

The arrest of Okamitsu, a Tokyo University graduate who rose to the pinnacle of administrative power, has crushed the remnants of public faith in the notion that elite bureaucrats are the nation’s best and brightest and are more competent and trustworthy than politicians at managing Japan’s affairs.

The Health Ministry is not alone. MITI launched an internal probe of cozy ties with an oil wholesaler who is now in jail on tax evasion charges.

And the abuses are by no means limited to Tokyo. Grass-roots groups have uncovered hundreds of cases of lavish entertainment by regional officials, falsified expense reports and slush funds used to wine and dine visiting bureaucrats from Tokyo.

Japanese political insiders are left wondering why so many scandals have suddenly come to light. Are more bureaucrats corrupt, or are they simply getting caught more often?

“These incidents existed before, but the scale now is larger,” said Japan’s bureaucrat emeritus, Nobuo Ishihara, who served as a top aide to seven prime ministers.

Ishihara said the moral caliber of the “career track” elite has fallen, and he called for a renewal of Confucian-style moral education.

“The only qualification for a ministry job now is test-taking ability,” Ishihara said.

Some analysts see the wave of disclosures of bureaucratic misdeeds as the result of political competition and bureaucratic in-fighting since the Liberal Democratic Party lost its 38-year lock on power in 1993.

The LDP now faces sophisticated and media-savvy opposition politicians who are well connected enough to learn of bureaucratic misdeeds and leak them for their own ends.

Others believe that Okamitsu was skewered by his own ministry.

A talented administrator, Okamitsu was instrumental in investigating--and leaking--details of the Health Ministry’s role in allowing a drug company to sell blood products known to be tainted with the human immunodeficiency virus that causes AIDS.

One ministry official was arrested and a number of top bureaucrats saw their careers ruined as a result.

During the November elections, anonymous letters alleging that Okamitsu himself had taken bribes were sent to media outlets, according to the “Sunday Project” television program.

The poison-pen letters were so specific--and have proved so accurate--that journalists believe that they could only have been written by a ministry insider.

Some analysts worry that the emphasis on bureaucratic greed and graft is diverting attention from the core issue: As long as bureaucrats have wide authority to make policy, grant licenses and dispense lucrative contracts with little accountability, industry will do whatever it can to seek their favors.

“The problem is not ethics; it’s structural and systematic,” said Norihiko Narita, a professor at Tsuruga University in Saitama prefecture, or state.

Neither Japanese politicians nor senior bureaucrats are required to disclose their assets, Narita noted.

Cracking down on bureaucrats ignores the problem of their political masters, the politicians who collect donations from industry and then intercede with the bureaucracy to secure projects and favors for the special interests, he added.

Ishihara said the ethics package is an expedient political sop to the irate public but will have little lasting effect.