In order to restrict the stock available to the public, MOF raised high barriers for new companies coming to market. Only long-established firms could ever consider a new listing on the Tokyo Stock Exchange. Even Japan's over-the-counter market (OTC), equivalent to the NASDAQ exchange in the United States, followed this "bigger and older is better" approach. The average review period for a company to list on the OTC was 5.7 years, and typically companies listing on the OTC have been around for decades, not a few years or months, as is the case with NASDAQ. «It's a cold, hard fact that in Japan newly launched companies have had no way of raising direct capital. In America they can; in Japan they can't,» says Denawa Yoshito, the founder of an over-the-counter Internet stock market for unlisted venture companies.

Matters began to change only in 1999, when, borne on the crest of a new wave of Internet euphoria, the OTC spurted upward, its index quadrupling in just one year. Even so, the OTC remains so dysfunctional, so far from the Internet-friendly marketplace that Japan's new entrepreneurs will need, that in the summer of 2000 Son Masayoshi, Japan's Internet wizard, set up a Japanese version of NASDAQ («Jasdaq»). In addition to easing the way for Japanese investors to buy American NASDAQ stocks, Jasdaq envisions listing promising Japanese ventures in New York, where they can source funds denied to them in Japan. The Tokyo Stock Exchange meanwhile set up its own emerging stock market, named Mothers. The pieces would seem to be in place for a brand-new form of stock investing. At the same time, all the old rules still apply over at the Tokyo Stock Exchange, where P/E ratios are still astronomical. It remains to be seen whether Mothers, the OTC, and Jasdaq can nurture stock that pays dividends and rewards investors-or whether they will follow the pattern of the Tokyo Stock Exchange in the 1980s and merely engineer another big Bubble.

During much of the past half century, money poured into the Tokyo Stock Exchange, driving stocks relentlessly upward. After decades in this hothouse atmosphere, Japan's financial community came to believe in the «magic of assets»: assets would always rise in value, especially when calculated by a technique, dear to MOF's heart, known as «book value accounting.» According to this system, owners of stocks, bonds, and property do not need to assess their holdings at market value. Instead, balance sheets show stock at the price purchased-the stock you bought at 100 seven years ago, though now worth 200, still appears on the books at 100.

This is a complete fiction, and it spawned a concept known as «latent profits,» which is the difference between purchase value and current value. The concept of «latent losses» did not exist. Investors have ignored dividends and looked exclusively at «asset value» and «latent profits.»

The same principles have ruled in real estate, where returns have averaged 2 percent or lower; even minus returns were common. The crash came even harder for real estate than it did for stocks, and by 1996 official land prices for Japan as a whole had dropped to half their 1991 peak (real prices were 88 percent off or lower at auction) and stayed low for the rest of the decade. Vacancy rates in Tokyo's commercial sector grew as high as 15 to 25 percent, and rents were half or a third of what they had been in 1988.

The «magic of assets» leads to a distorted view of Japan's strengths, since so much energy has gone into making banks and securities houses bigger but not necessarily better. In 1995, when ranked by assets, the top-ten banks in the world were all Japanese, with twenty-nine banks in the top one hundred (versus only nine U.S. banks). However, when Moody's Investors Service quantified liabilities, it found that only five of Japan's eleven city banks had assets in excess of bad loans; no banks rated A, only one rated B, three C, and twenty-six banks D. By early 1999, the average rating of major banks had slid to E+, meaning that they were essentially bankrupt. Obviously, size alone is not a good measure of financial health, since liabilities may equal or even exceed assets, and the truest measure of health is profitability, in which case not a single Japanese bank got into the top one hundred.

Lack of profits sapped the energy of Japanese banks, so that in time foreign banks outstripped them through profitable growth and mega-mergers. By July 1999, only two Japanese banks had made it into the world's top ten. One had a negative return on assets, the other nearly zero – at a time when Citigroup and BankAmerica, the top two on the list, were making more than 1.3 percent returns on much larger asset bases.

In Japan's asset-based system, size meant everything; in time, therefore, MOF mandated a wave of mergers so that Japan's banks could reclaim their position as the world's largest. Moriaki Osamu, the director of the Restructuring Agency, is reported to have said, «In order to preserve the financial system we have to shut our eyes [to unprofitable banks]. But, since they can't survive on their own, we've ordered them to merge.» In other words, Japan's bank mergers simply combined small hills of losses into larger mountains of losses. In August 1999, three banks – DKB, IBJ, and Fuji Bank – merged to create the world's largest bank by assets, yet the merger did nothing to make the resulting behemoth profitable. The well-known consultant Ohmae Ken'ichi compares the bank to the Yamato, Japan's giant warship in World War II that sank before it had a chance to fire its guns. By mid-2000, Japan once again had four of the five largest world banks – all of them huge money – losers.

This did not disturb MOF, however, because in Japan's credit system losses and debt have no consequences. Banks rarely make unfriendly recalls of debt within their keiretsu (industrial groupings), allowing companies within their grouping to borrow safely far more than their counterparts in the rest of the world. It has been in a company's best interest to borrow as much as it can so as to acquire more and more capital assets and never to sell them. A company would borrow against assets such as land, and then reinvest that money in the stock market. The market would rise, and the company would then have «latent profits» against which to borrow more money, with which to buy land. And on to the next round.

This cycle of assets-debt-assets is the background for the madness that seized Japan during the Bubble. It explains why IBJ lent Madame Nui money to buy IBJ's own bonds in a deal that cost her $30 million the moment she signed the contract. IBJ knew well why she wanted those bonds. She took her bondholdings to other banks, which were glad to lend her more billions because she had such blue-chip collateral.

This system flies in the face of Western economic theory, but it worked brilliantly in Japan for the first years after World War II, allowing Japan to pull itself up by its own bootstraps. Karel van Wolferen calls the system «credit ordering,» and it is important to remember that it really did achieve great success, turning Japan in a few decades into the world's second-largest industrial power. Since then the South Koreans have copied Japan's credit ordering and so to a greater or lesser extent have most of the so-called Asian Tigers.

This new paradigm of capitalism once appeared to have triumphed over old-fashioned Western values such as the law of supply and demand. There was just one little flaw. As Nigel Holloway and Robert Zielinski wrote back in 1991, «The competitive advantages that Japanese companies gain from their stock market depend on a single factor: share prices must go up.» The Ministry of Finance patched together an intricate machine to support this market: stocks that yielded no dividends, real estate that produced no cash flow, debts that companies never needed to repay, and balance sheets that legally hid losses and liabilities. In this market, no Japanese company could ever go wrong. It was the envy of the developed world.

It was a powerhouse, but it also was a Ponzi scheme. Ponzi schemes work well as long as money keeps flowing in; when the flow stops or slows down, trouble ensues. During the period of high growth that lasted until the late 1980s, Japan's financial system seemed invincible. The economy grew at an annual rate of 4 to 6 percent for so long that everyone took it for granted that this would continue indefinitely. When, in the early 1990s, it slowed to 1 percent or less, the system began to fall apart.

The aim of the contraption the Ministry of Finance had rigged up for Japan's financial world was peace or, rather, stasis. No bank could ever fail; no investor could ever lose by playing the stock market. Everywhere, cartels and monopolies ruled, guided by the firm hand of bureaucrats. This desire for peace, for no surprises, is such a strong factor in traditional Japanese culture that the Law of No Surprises comes first in my personal Ten Laws of Japanese Life. There is no better paradigm for this than the tea ceremony, where detailed rules determine in advance every slight turn of the wrist, the placement of every object, and virtually every spoken word. No society has ever gone to such extreme lengths to rein in spontaneity. In the industrial arena, employees rarely change companies; small start-ups do not challenge established large firms. Concrete slabs armor river-banks and seacoasts to guard against any unwelcome surprises from nature.

The Law of No Surprises means that people find it difficult to let go of failed policies and cut their losses-a process that we will see at work in many fields in Japan. The inability to cut losses is what underlay the Daiwa Bank scandal of July 1995, when the U.S. Federal Reserve discovered that Daiwa had hidden $1.1 billion of trading losses from federal authorities, and also the Sumitomo Trading scandal of October 1996, in which a copper trader for Sumitomo Trading in Great Britain ran up $2.6 billion in secret losses. Both cases involved a spiraling series of bad trades that lasted years-in the case of Daiwa, for more than a decade. Neither the traders nor their parent companies were able to call a halt at an early stage.

Traditionalists hold the hallowed word Wa (peace, or harmony) as Japan's ultimate ideal, even going so far as to use Wa as an alternate name for Japan itself. The nation's first constitution, promulgated by Prince Shotoku in 604, began with the words «Harmony [Wa] is to be valued, and an avoidance of wanton opposition to be honored.» To update this to the twentieth century, read «market forces» for «wanton opposition.» There is a hankering after a peaceful golden age, when everyone knew his place and all human relations worked like clockwork-the quiet harmony of the feudal era. In the words o^ the seventeenth-century novelist Ihara Saikaku, Japan is the land of peace, with «the spring breezes stilled and not a rippl upon the four seas.»