Japan’s voters get what’s coming to them

PEOPLE GET THE GOVERNMENT THEY DESERVE, goes the saying in the West, but that concept does not seem to have reached Japan yet. Polls show that the problem of “money and politics” is one of the primary concerns of the electorate, but electorate still hasn’t realized that the real issue is not just a problem of money and politics. It is also a problem of money and government, as well as the nexus of money, politics, and government.

They also still haven’t realized that ultimately, they are the problem. Until the voters confront these issues more forthrightly, as well as their enabling behavior that allows these problems to exist, they will always be plagued by corruption.

Illustrating this is the blog post by university professor and author Nobuo Ikeda on the book Matsuoka Toshikatsu to “Utsukushii Nihon” (Toshikatsu Matsuoka and “Beautiful Japan”). The title refers to Japan’s former agriculture minister, who committed suicide on the day he was to testify about his involvement in a scandal for mishandling public funds, and Prime Minister Abe’s book, Toward a Beautiful Country.

The book was written by Hiroshi Hasegawa, a former Asahi Shimbun reporter turned freelance journalist, and published in July just before the upper house elections. Here is my quick and dirty translation of Prof. Ikeda’s post:

The well-known author is a veteran journalist who specialized in agricultural issues for the Asahi Shimbun. He was already the leading media expert in the field when I investigated agricultural subsidies. During my investigation, I became painfully aware that the state of Japanese agriculture was even worse than the author describes.

Every government office performs essential work. Even the Social Insurance Agency can’t be closed down, so it will be privatized. But the agricultural ministry has no core work. When I conducted my investigations in the field, I found that agricultural subsidies were used for bathhouses with no customers, and for facilities called “agricultural information centers”, which were filled with dozens of unused PCs. As the author says, we would suffer absolutely no harm if the agriculture ministry were abolished tomorrow. Yet that ministry has an annual budget of more than three trillion yen.

Matsuoka came into public awareness during the controversy over subsidies at the GATT Uruguay Round discussions in 1994. Calling himself the head of the “fighting squad”, he staged a sit-in wearing a hachimaki. He demanded a greater amount than the 3.5 trillion yen proposed by the government at that time, and his efforts resulted in subsidies that swelled to six trillion yen. That money was distributed nationwide with no clear accounting of who received it and what it was used for. There still has been no accounting today.

Therefore, Toshikatsu Matsuoka is nothing but a symbol. He merely revealed to us the content of the immense void that is the bureaucratic organization. That void remains despite his death. Even the Democratic Party of Japan has promised to dispense subsidies. Its party platform calls for an increase in food self-sufficiency. Having learned a lesson from its electoral defeat, the Liberal Democratic Party is poised to increase its handouts under the name of redressing regional disparities.

And the prime minister who chose Matsuoka as agriculture minister remains in office, running the government under the slogan, “A Beautiful Country”.

Worthy of Note

• The ministry’s annual budget is more than three trillion yen. Agriculture accounts for less than 1% of Japan’s GDP.
• The late Mr. Matsuoka got his swag both coming and going. He gamed both the government and the political systems, shaking the money tree to receive enormous subsidies distributed by the agricultural ministry (some of which might have slipped into his pocket en route), as he cooked the books to steal government money as a member of the Diet.
• Both Mr. Hasegawa and Prof. Ikeda think there would be no harm in eliminating the Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry, and Fisheries altogether. (Prof. Ikeda explains in this subsequent post, in Japanese, how this might be accomplished.) This is a political platform after my own heart—I’m one of those who believe that only four Cabinet ministries are necessary: Justice, Finance/Treasury, Defense, and State/Foreign Affairs. The rest are just vehicles for conveying political pork or placating the public. Any legitimate functions they have could be transferred to smaller agencies or privatized, and the rest of their activities abolished.
• This problem is not specific to the ruling Liberal Democratic Party. Prof. Ikeda mentions that the Democratic Party of Japan has promised to continue dispensing public funds much like the beans, money, and other prizes tossed out at Shinto shrines during the setsubun holiday. Read this Yomiuri article to get an idea of the legal vote buying schemes they’ve incorporated in their platform.

Have the voters of Japan thought about why they have just gotten their fourth Minister of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries in less than a year? Or why the third, Takehiko Endo, lasted only eight days before being forced out of office by a money scandal reeking of piggish greed and stupidity?

The first minister, the aforementioned Toshikatsu Matsuoka, was in office for eight months. He hung himself before having to answer charges of swindling at least US$ two million from the government for bogus office expense claims. (There is one report, however, that he actually spent it on geisha, which could in fact be a euphemism for high-priced nightclub hostesses.)

His successor, Norihiko Akagi, lasted two months before he started showing symptoms of the same disease. Mr. Akagi listed his parents’ home in Ibaraki Prefecture as the office of a political support organization. From 1990 to 2005, he was reimbursed for more than 123 million yen for rent, utilities, and other expenses. But Mr. Akagi’s father said the house was not used as an office, and he never received any rent.

Sitting duck number three was Takehiko Endo, who lasted all of eight days—the second-shortest term for a Cabinet member in postwar history. His scandal involved government money, not political funds—he headed a farm cooperative that received subsidies for weather damage in a 1999 grape harvest, which they exaggerated by one million yen. They also padded their membership numbers. The cooperative never got around to returning the money after authorities pointed out the problem. His replacement is Masatoshi Wakabayashi, agricultural minister number four.

But there was more to this comedy of errors over the past week.

• Parliamentary Secretary for Foreign Affairs Yukiko Sakamoto resigned after it was learned that her campaign office submitted receipts totaling an identical amount of 87,537 yen for both 2004 and 2005, thus creating suspicions that they were trying to inflate her political spending.
• It was revealed that employees at the Social Insurance Agency embezzled roughly 113 million yen in 26 separate cases from 1995 to 2006, including pension premiums and benefits.
• Retired Health, Labor, and Welfare bureaucrat Masaru Matsushima, already under suspicion for collusion in a scandal involving a government affiliate, admitted receiving money and luxury cars from the former head of a welfare organization.
• Yutaka Kobayashi of the LDP resigned from the upper house after an accountant and campaign staff member were charged with violating election laws. Under the guilt-by-association clause of the Public Offices Election law, if a candidate wins an election and someone connected with a campaign commits a serious violation, the candidate is stripped of office and prohibited from running for five years.

By now, some readers might suspect that Prime Minister Abe is presiding over one of the most corrupt administrations ever to rule Japan.

But that isn’t necessarily the case. We have to view his administration in the Japanese context. Get ready for the context: never have political and govermental money scandals been so entertaining.

The Background

In March 1993, Shin Kanemaru, known as the don and once considered Japan’s most powerful politician, was sent to prison for tax evasion. Mr. Kanemaru was known for his fund-raising ability. He pled guilty to accepting the equivalent of US$ 4.6 million in illegal donations from a trucking company with mob ties.

When police searched his home and offices, they found US$ 50 million in gold bullion, bearer bonds and cash. Mr. Kanemaru assured everyone that it was for political and not personal purposes.

In July 1993, 56 LDP legislators left the party to protest corruption and bring about political reform. The LDP lost the general election that month, bringing a seven-party coalition government into power.

That government was led by Morihiro Hosokawa, former LDP member and governor of Kumamoto Prefecture. He pledged to reform politics and fight corruption. Mr. Hosokawa resigned eight months later when it was alleged he received more than US$ 900,000 from a mob-related company in the 80s.

The man pulling the strings behind the new government, however, was Ichiro Ozawa. He had left the LDP to save his own neck when the noose started tightening around the neck of his patron, Shin Kanemaru, the aforementioned don who kept gold bullion in his kitchen cabinet.

But Mr. Ozawa’s original patron was former Prime Minister Kakuei Tanaka, the Boss Tweed of postwar Japanese politics.

At the start of his political career, in the late 1940s, Mr. Tanaka was sent to jail for taking a million-yen bribe. He eventually redeemed himself politically, but his career continued to be dogged by scandal. During the mid-sixties, he used a geisha’s name for several suspicious Tokyo land deals. In 1976, the vice-chairman of the Lockheed Corp. revealed that Mr. Tanaka took US$ 1.8 million in bribes for having a Japanese airline buy Lockheed L-1011 aircraft. He was eventually found guilty and sentenced to 4 years in jail.

Thus it was no particular surprise that Ichiro Ozawa admitted in November 1993, while calling the shots for the reform-minded Hosokawa administration, to receiving US$ 46,000 in cash from a construction company the year before. Many Japanese political scandals at the time involved construction companies.

In April 2001, the LDP selected dark-horse candidate Junichiro Koizumi as party president, and therefore prime minister. Mr. Koizumi appointed Makiko Tanaka to the post of Foreign Minister as a quid pro quo for her campaign efforts on his behalf. Ms. Tanaka was the daughter of the aforementioned Prime Minister Kakuei Tanaka, convicted twice of taking bribes. In fact, Ms. Tanaka had won election to his former Diet seat.

She embarked on a campaign to clean up corruption in the Foreign Ministry. Among the revelations that resulted was the existence of slush funds in each ministry section totaling an aggregate 20 million yen. The money was used to pay for internal staff parties.

At least five foreign ministry officials were fired that year in fund-related scandals, and another 326 others were disciplined for using more than $US 1.6 million of ministry money for personal expenses.

The police arrested a foreign ministry official on charges of defrauding the government of tens of thousands of dollars in phony hotel bills. Three major fraud scandals were uncovered in the foreign ministry. Another arrested official was in charge of VIP trips, and he had swindled the government out of more than 500 million yen. The consul general in Denver also was fired for using government funds for personal purposes, including buying artwork for his collection.

This did not win Ms. Tanaka any friends in the ministry. Officials tried to stymie her investigation by transferring witnesses overseas, so she froze all transfers. The bureaucrats leaked embarrassing information about her to the press, and they failed to give her important information or necessary briefings. Some openly ridiculed her; in one instance they inserted some nonsense into a boilerplate speech on policy she delivered in the Diet because they knew she would read it out without having reviewed it in advance.

At one point, she barred several of them from her office and called the ministry a “castle full of demons”. This naturally caused a lot of public concern about the country’s conduct of foreign affairs.

But the problems were exacerbated by Ms. Tanaka’s abrasive personality. Many in the Japanese media were taken aback by her assignment as the nation’s top diplomat; her blunt speech and high-handed attitude before taking office was anything but diplomatic. In addition, her behavior in the post was rather erratic. At times, she refused to meet several visiting diplomats, including US Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage. She later said she was “in a panic” at the time.

At a press conference following the September 11 terrorist attacks, Ms. Tanaka revealed the secret location of the U.S. State Department’s emergency headquarters. As a result, the bureaucrats cut her out of the information loop. She also reportedly kept the visiting Iranian foreign minister waiting for 40 minutes, apparently because she was looking for a lost ring. She finally ordered an aide to buy a replacement. She sometimes refused to answer questions during interpellations in the Diet, and once abruptly walked out while she was being questioned by a Diet committee, saying she had to use the bathroom.

Ms. Tanaka had problems with legislators in addition to bureaucrats. Muneo Suzuki, an LDP lower house member from Hokkaido, had carved out his own sphere of influence in the Foreign Ministry. The two clashed when she claimed that he had excluded some NGOs from an aid conference for Afghanistan held in Tokyo.

Her position deteriorated further when she began to feud with Prime Minister Koizumi over the dismissal of some Foreign Ministry officials. He wanted them gone because he believed (or said he believed) they were responsible for the ministry’s corruption problems. She wanted to keep them at first, but eventually backed down. Finally, the government prohibited her, its own foreign minister, from attending a meeting of G8 foreign ministers in New York.

Mr. Koizumi ultimately fired her because she had become more trouble than she was worth to him; he said her difficulties in getting along with Mr. Suzuki and other politicians prevented the efficient conduct of state business.

A few months later, Ms. Tanaka was the subject of an investigation that charged she had used public funds to pay staff not on her official payroll. The LDP launched an inquiry, and she refused to participate. The party suspended her for two years, but she left the party and resigned from her Diet seat. She was eventually charged in the matter, but the charges were dropped by the prosecutor in 2003.

Meanwhile, Muneo Suzuki was making news of his own, developing a reputation as the most dishonest man in Japan. He and an aide were eventually convicted of taking bribes totaling roughly US $90,000 from a lumber company in 1997 and 1998. The money was payment for the pressure he applied to the Forestry Agency to award contracts to the lumber company. In addition to the contretemps with Ms. Tanaka, Mr. Suzuki also was accused of physically beating staff members of the Foreign Affairs ministry.

He too left the LDP and the Diet officially passed a resolution asking him to resign, but he refused. Mr. Suzuki chose not to run for reelection in 2003 because he was being treated for stomach cancer. He eventually went to prison and served 437 days in solitary confinement.

It was his interrogation in the Diet, however, that led to one of the most arresting scenes in postwar Japanese history. Kiyomi Tsujimoto of the Social Democratic Party (formerly the Socialists) was one of the people tasked with asking him questions during an official Diet investigation. This questioning was televised.

Ms. Tsujimoto was (at the time) a younger, perky woman of the type that appeal to Japanese, and she had briefly became a media darling for her questioning of Prime Minister Koizumi in earlier Diet interpellations. She also had been chosen as a Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum in 2000.

Perhaps her new-found fame had gone to her head. During her questioning, she accused Mr. Suzuki of being a “trading company” for scandal. Mr. Suzuki is a man quick to anger (and quick to cry), and he exploded at Ms. Tsujimoto for what he considered to be piling on and showboating at his expense. He lost his composure and wound up screaming at her during the questioning period; the media enjoyed replaying the video for several days afterward.

Some time later, a staff member of the Democratic Party of Japan and former employee of the SDP revealed that Ms. Tsujimoto used the name of another Diet member’s secretary to transfer government funds to her own personal account. She was arrested for fraud in July 2003 for stealing about 18.8 million yen and pleaded guilty in November, receiving a suspended sentence.

Ms. Tsujimoto is also known for her North Korean sympathies and soft-pedaling that country’s abduction of Japanese citizens. In addition, Fusako Shigenobu, a leader of the Japanese Red Army terrorist group, was arrested in Ms. Tsujimoto’s home district while she was in the company of a member of Ms. Tsujimoto’s staff. Ms. Tsujimoto was also reportedly the lover of former Red Army member Akira Kitagawa, and circumstantial evidence arose at her trial of financial contributions she made to the group. (There used to be English links for this, but they seem to have disappeared.)

Local Government

Conditions in Japanese local government are much the same, but without the colorful personalities and operatic behavior. Slush funds and improper billing are the swindles of choice in the provinces.

Nagasaki Prefecture

Nagasaki Prefecture Governor Genjiro Kaneko told a press conference last year that four prefectural departments used phony billing statements to create a slush fund totaling 20 million yen. The departments told companies to send bills for items that weren’t purchased and to pool the funds. Prefectural employees often used the money for personal expenses. These included purchasing prizes for golf competitions among prefectural employees, birthday presents for supervisors, and instant ramen for one department’s employees.

The prefecture confirmed that 40 departments and bureaus had been involved in the scheme since 1999. At one point, the slush fund total reached 180 million yen. The governor knew about them for seven years, but didn’t say anything about it publicly.

Nagasaki City

It has been revealed that during the third term of Mayor Itcho Itoh, who was murdered by a gangster with a grudge earlier this year, Nagasaki City had slush funds totaling just under 400 million yen, with another 3.7 billion yen diverted for improper billing schemes (ordering one item but taking delivery of another).

Miyazaki Prefecture

When Gov. Hideo Higashikokubaru took office in January this year, he was concerned about the possible existence of slush funds in the prefecture, and he ordered an investigation. The prefecture announced the results of that investigation today, which were reported in Japanese in the Nishinippon Shimbun.

The amount of money pooled by submitting sham orders for products from suppliers and parking the funds totaled 317 billion yen over the past five years. The probe also discovered an additional 57 million yen in false accounting practices. Though the prefectural government claimed that none of the money was diverted to personal use, it was discovered that the funds were used to buy uniforms for prefectural employee baseball teams, electrical carpets, cots, tableware dryers, and blood pressure monitors. Five hundred employees will be asked to return funds.

The slush funds were created not only by government departments and agencies, but also by more than 40 local police departments and a prefectural social welfare facility for young children. A separate survey of prefectural employees found that half of those surveyed knew of the slush funds, but thought “that’s just the way things are”.

Governor Higashikokubaru became the prefecture’s chief executive in a special election in January after his predecessor, Tadahiro Ando, resigned over bid-rigging charges. Mr. Ando was later arrested.

Osaka Metropolitan District

A slush fund of about 1.3 billion yen was found in 1997, but another 1.02 million yen was discovered later. An additional 68.5 million yen was found at 23 locations. Some of this money was used for personal expenditures and recreational activities. In 2006, the government disciplined 163 officials in connection with the slush funds, firing three.

Gifu Prefecture

The prefecture created multiple slush funds over 12 years totaling an estimated 1.7 billion yen, involving more than half of Gifu’s employees and most of the prefectural government’s departments. Their existence was revealed last July.

Wakayama Prefecture

Governor Yoshiki Kimura resigned last December after being arrested for his involvement in a bid-rigging scandal.

How Japanese voters deal with miscreants

Kakuei Tanaka

As the scandals engulfed him, the former prime minister said he would never resign from the Diet as long as he had his constituents’ support. Then-Prime Minister Nakasone dissolved the Diet in 1985 and called for a new election.

Mr. Tanaka received more votes than any other candidate in the country.

Where are they now?

Norihiko Akagi resigned as agriculture minister, but retains his seat in the lower house representing Ibaraki’s first district

Takehiko Endo resigned as agriculture minister, but retains his seat in the lower house representing Yamagata’s second district

Yukiko Sakamoto resigned as parliamentary vice minister for foreign affairs, but retains her seat in the upper house.

Fukushiro Nukaga stepped down as director of the Defense Agency in 1998 in a procurement scandal. He resigned from another Cabinet position after admitting that he received 15 million yen (US$130,000) in improper contributions from an insurance company in 1999 and 2000.

He is now the Finance Minister in Prime Minister Abe’s second cabinet. He has been a member of the lower house since 1983 representing Ibaraki’s second district.

Ichiro Ozawa is now the head of the Democratic Party of Japan, the nation’s largest opposition party. He has been a member of the lower house since 1969 representing Iwate’s fourth district.

Makiko Tanaka was reelected to the lower house of the Diet as an independent. She is in her fifth term representing Niigata’s fifth district. She caucuses with both the opposition Democratic Party of Japan and the Independents’ Club.

Muneo Suzuki was released from jail and formed the New Party Daichi. He is the only elected member of the party. He was reelected to the lower house in 2005, representing a proportional district in the Hokkaido block.

Kiyomi Tsujimoto was reinstated by her party and won election to a proportional representation seat in the lower house in 2005, representing the Kinki block.

One month later, in October 2005, the weekly magazine Shinshio reported that she said:

「国会議員って言うのは、国民の生命と財産を守るといわれてるけど、私はそんなつもりでなってへん。私は国家の枠をいかに崩壊させるかっていう役割の国会議員や」

“Diet members are supposed to protect the lives and property of the people, but that is not my intention. My role as a Diet member is to somehow destroy the structure of the state.”

So there’s the context. Viewed from that perspective, having four agriculture ministers in less than a year does not seem so outlandish after all.

It would seem that getting caught in a political or governmental scandal in Japan is a minor inconvenience. All the people we discussed for their involvement in scandals have become zombies–they’ve come back from the political graveyard and recovered their Diet seats (if they lost their Diet seats at all). One wonders why Mr. Matsuoka chose suicide rather than face the muzak.

As the saying goes, people get the government they deserve.

And this is what the Japanese electorate deserves.