Disgusted Public Balks at Japan Inc.
Yuichi Goto, a 48-year-old baker from the sleepy outskirts of Tokyo, seems an unlikely character to reform Japan Inc.
Working out of a bakery little larger than a Southern California walk-in closet, Goto has dared not only to fight City Hall but also to sue Japan’s mighty bureaucrats for wasting taxpayers’ money--and win.
With a few court victories and many embarrassing newspaper headlines, Goto has single-handedly badgered the city and other local entities into returning about $8 million in misspent funds to public coffers.
Over the last several years, the baker and other like-minded activists have scored stunning gains in exposing systemic corruption in Japan’s local governments. Now they aim to improve financial accountability in the national government.
The watchdogs are pinning their hopes on growing public disgust over a torrent of recent scandals and a government promise to introduce Japan’s first information-disclosure law this spring.
Goto, Japan’s answer to Ralph Nader, rises at 3 a.m. to churn out buttery croissants and anpan rolls full of sweet red-bean paste to sell to the harried commuters who eat breakfast on the run. By the time Tokyo’s bureaucrats arrive at their desks, he is working the telephone that seems to grow out of his shoulder, pestering them to hand over documents about public spending while rolling out a fresh batch of dough.
By night, the insomniac baker inputs a trove of municipal spending records into his personal computer, crunching the numbers to ferret out dubious bar bills, lavish restaurant tabs, reimbursements for business trips that never took place, nonexistent overtime or taxpayer-funded junkets to hot springs.
Sometimes he makes nocturnal forays to Shinjuku, Tokyo’s most famous entertainment district, to find out whether public servants have been wining and dining on the taxpayers’ yen and then falsifying their expense reports. Then he goes to court--about 50 times over the last 14 years--to demand disclosure and redress.
“We’re paying taxes, and these guys are spending it,” said Goto, who blames official corruption and incompetence for Japan’s current economic woes, including its banking fiasco. “They apologize and apologize, but meanwhile they’re steadily hiding the money. If only the people knew about it, they’d be furious.”
The Japanese people are now finding out. Credit goes not only to Goto but to other individual whistle-blowers, a potent network of about 3,000 local activists called the Citizens Ombudsman Coalition, increasingly feisty prosecutors and the recent scandals. Prime Minister Ryutaro Hashimoto’s poll ratings have plummeted, and faith in government competence and honesty is considered to be at a postwar low.
Reevaluating the Social Contract
Scandals seem to drench Japan as often as typhoons, but the recent arrest of two Finance Ministry officials on bribery charges may do more than the usual political damage. Until now, the ministry had been granted the privilege of investigating itself, but this time prosecutors independently uncovered evidence of alleged corruption, and pounced. The Japanese economy, ailing since 1991, is once again teetering on the brink of recession, and the Finance Ministry was seen as the agency primarily responsible for fixing it.
Under the postwar political compact that has produced half a century of remarkable growth and prosperity in Japan, public officials have been accorded far more power, respect and administrative discretion than their U.S. counterparts. In return, they are expected to ensure peace, stability, honest administration and fast-growing national wealth. The recent failure to deliver on the latter two items is seen as accelerating an ever-so-incremental reevaluation of that social contract.
Even before the recent bombshell at the Finance Ministry, Japan’s bureaucrats were under fierce attack for cronyism, collusion with the industries they regulate, living high at the public’s expense, manipulating hapless politicians and blocking information disclosure.
For the last three years, Japanese newspapers have delighted in reporting embarrassing revelations about entertainment abuses, fraud and payola, as well as officials stonewalling, censoring documents, altering records and even lying in court.
What is news is the results: Public outrage forced the mayor of the northeastern city of Sendai to resign, and two governors’ mansions have changed hands. Since 1994, local officials across the country have been forced to return $326 million in misspent taxpayer money, according to a Yomiuri newspaper tally.
And the hoary practice of kan-kan settai, or bureaucrats lavishly entertaining one another at taxpayer expense, has been brought to a screeching halt--at least temporarily, said ombudsman coalition attorney Toshiaki Takahashi.
“We don’t know about the bureaucrats in Kasumigaseki,” Takahashi said, referring to the Tokyo neighborhood where Japan’s key national ministries and agencies are located. “But from what we can see, the behavior of the local authorities has changed dramatically.”
An ombudsman coalition survey of Japan’s 47 prefectures found that spending on entertainment has plunged 60% in just two years, from $240 million in 1995 to $96 million in 1997, Takahashi said.
Other Signs of Government Openness
There are other signs of Japanese-style glasnost, the openness in government promised by former Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev that reformers say is almost as necessary for Japan. It remains to be seen whether these changes will prove anything more than cosmetic, but the following developments are being closely watched here:
* Hashimoto’s Cabinet has promised to introduce to parliament an information-disclosure law--a Japanese version of the U.S. Freedom of Information Act--by the end of March.
Such a law would, for the first time, allow the public to probe national spending. Activists and newspapers now must rely on voluntary disclosure, leaks or access under local information-disclosure rules.
Foes complain that the Liberal Democratic Party’s proposed information-disclosure bill has giant loopholes. The opposition has already drafted a much more sweeping bill. But attorney Mikio Akiyama, a director of the Japan Civil Liberties Union, says that even the LDP draft would give citizens vastly expanded ability to learn what their government is up to.
* Last month, gavel-to-gavel coverage of parliament began airing on Japanese satellite television. State-run NHK television has aired important debates and hearings since 1952, but that coverage amounts to fewer than 100 out of 3,000 hours of annual proceedings, said Yoshitsugu Tanaka, president of the new C-Net network.
“If there’s a time conflict between sumo [wrestling] and a parliament session, NHK broadcasts sumo, because that’s what the public wants to see,” said Tanaka, a former political reporter. And because politicians grandstand for those brief appearances on camera, voters have never had an unvarnished look at the day-to-day workings of their legislature, he said.
Kiyoyuki Tanaka, a founder of the Japan Voters’ Assn., called the new coverage “one of the few pieces of good news” for political reform. “Japanese politicians, whether they write or speak, tend do so in such a way that they can never be pinned down afterward,” he said, predicting that the continuous coverage will boost the fortunes of any politician brave enough to speak plainly to the public and will increase accountability.
* A series of local referendums is challenging Tokyo’s right to force unpopular decisions upon regional governments. Since 1996, three towns have voted no on nuclear power plants and industrial waste dumps, and Okinawa voted for a vague resolution demanding that the burden of the U.S military presence on that southern island be reduced.
In December, voters in Nago on Okinawa rejected a plan to build a U.S. military heliport that Hashimoto had promised President Clinton.
These referendums, although not legally binding, are significant acts of political defiance and are seen as evidence that Japanese voters are not as pliant as their politicians have long assumed.
* Corruption investigations are spreading into agencies that have until now been considered models of Confucian rectitude. They include not only the Finance Ministry, whose Tokyo University-educated elite has long been viewed as the most intellectually and morally fit to govern Japan, but also the Defense Agency, whose officials reportedly accepted favors from defense contractors, and the Tokyo Metropolitan Police Agency.
* In response to the arrest of the Finance Ministry inspectors on charges they took bribes in exchange for leaking inside information to the banks they regulated, Hashimoto has promised a tough ethics law for public servants. A cynical Japanese public will be watching carefully to see whether the bill has teeth.
The recent arrests of the two banking inspectors quickly triggered the resignations of the finance minister and the top bureaucrat who wields the real power at the ministry, the suicide of another senior ministry official, and seizures of truckloads of records from the ministry and four key banks.
Analysts say vigorous prosecutors could fell more officials.
Japanese intellectuals, liberals and the media, as well as some business leaders, have begun to question whether bureaucrats--even honest ones--are the right people to lead the world’s No. 2 economy in an era of global market forces.
In addition, Japanese courts have shown an unprecedented willingness to rule against bureaucrats on “right to know” issues, said the ombudsman coalition’s Takahashi.
The lawyer likes to display one document that might have come from the Soviet Union, a receipt produced by Saga prefecture in response to a request for information about spending by its Tokyo office.
Every single line of the document was blacked out, and small wonder. When a court finally ordered Saga to hand over the uncut version, it showed that taxpayers had paid $1,474 for a dinner for two prefectural officials and three national bureaucrats from the Agriculture Ministry. That’s $295 a head--steep even by Tokyo standards.
Now Takahashi is seeking the court-ordered disclosure of documents he believes will prove a conspiracy of bid-fixing, or dango, by some of Japan’s best-known companies in connection with a nationwide sewer project. Such a lawsuit would have been doomed even a few years ago, he said, because “Japanese courts almost always come up with decisions that justify the behavior of the authorities.”
Disclosure Law Sought by Opposition
Japan’s major opposition parties--in disarray but regrouping under an alliance called the Minyuren--also have a vital interest in freedom of information.
A disclosure law would give even lawmakers access to more information than they have now, said the Sun Party’s Ikuo Horigome, who helped draft Minyuren’s bill. For example, Horigome cited the need for a breakdown of the public works spending included in a special financial-stimulus bill now before parliament.
“We could find out which construction companies are working on what projects,” Horigome said. “This would be the first step toward changing the collusive relationship between construction companies, bureaucrats and politicians.”
According to the JCLU’s Akiyama, the government version of the bill clearly states that the public’s right to information that affects health or safety takes precedence over individual privacy or corporate interests. No other nation has as progressive a legal guarantee, he said.
Some version of the freedom of information bill is seen as almost sure to pass this spring, and activists like Goto are already eager to find out where national tax money is going.
Attorney Isamu Hashimoto argues that it will be a shame if the new information-disclosure law is used only to dig up dirt on bureaucrats, when it should be used to provoke informed public debate about government policy.
Hashimoto, who has defended the Tokyo ward of Setagaya against several of Goto’s lawsuits, says opinion is divided among the bureaucrats who are the baker’s quarry. “Some people wish he would go further” in rooting out corruption, Hashimoto said. “Others think he is a real jerk.”
Goto insists that more exposure and more economic insecurity are slowly rousing Japanese voters from an apathy he terms “peace senility.”
“People are very angry, and their anger is different from before,” he said. But he conceded that his movement still has a long way to go.
“Japan is not really a democratic country,” the baker said sadly. “The people do what the bureaucrats tell them, just as they have always done. The Japanese people never bled for democracy. I feel that unless we struggle to achieve it, it will not take root in society.”
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Chiaki Kitada of The Times’ Tokyo Bureau contributed to this report.
