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,» «an anomaly.» In February 1999, as the government was about to infuse ?7 trillion into the failing banking system, he claimed that the financial crisis would end «in a week or two.» This despite the fact that admitted bad loans (at that time) amounted to ?49 trillion, seven times the amount of the government bailout.
Alas, the crisis will not end in a week or two, because the world has changed. For MOF, no harkening after the old days of protected local markets will save Japan's depressed stock market, bankrupt pension funds, banks submerged in red ink-and a national debt that is the highest in the world. Fundamental problems beset other ministries as well. And yet the bureaucrats have still not been called to account. When the official at the Environment Agency remarked, «Even if underground water in Kobe is contaminated by chemicals, few people drink the water,» he was essentially responding, «Rien.» Dioxin in the water table? Not to worry. As for the destruction of Japan's last great wetlands at Isahaya, well, said the chief of the Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry, and Fisheries, «The current ecosystem may disappear, but nature will create a new one.»
For those looking to what the future is likely to bring to Japan during the next few decades, the answer "Rien" is an important one to understand. It rules for a simple reason: the Zaito piggy bank is still flush with postal savings. No force on earth can stop the forward march of Japan's bureaucracy for the simple reason that there is ample money to support it.
«Rien» does not mean just business as usual. As we have seen earlier from the Law of Bureaucratic Inertia, it means gradual acceleration: more of the same business, and faster. Most readers will be familiar with Dukas's music for The Sorcerer's Apprentice, which was featured in a famous animation sequence in Walt Disney's Fantasia. The story is that a sorcerer asks his apprentice to fetch water while he is away, but the boy is too lazy to do it himself. He uses a bit of magic stolen from his master by which he empowers a broom to fetch the water for him. For a while, all goes well. But the water keeps accumulating, and the apprentice realizes that he doesn't know the spell that will make the broom stop. The broom multiplies. Soon hundreds of brooms are pouring torrents of water. The music builds to a climax – there is no stemming the flood now – but finally the sorcerer returns, and in an instant the brooms stop and the waters recede.
Japan's bureaucracy is like this. Before World War II, the bureaucrats had already consolidated power but had to share it with the armed forces and the big zaibatsu business cartels. After the war, with the army and the zaibatsu discredited, politicians, the press, and the public consigned their fate to bureaucrats, allowing them near-dictatorial powers and asking no questions. For a while, the system worked reasonably well. But in the 1970s, things started to get out of hand. Government agencies began to bury cities and countryside under ever more aggressive building schemes, piling dam on top of dam and landfill on top of landfill. The tempo of the music sped up. Agencies started multiplying. First there were tokushu hojin, then there were koeki hojin, and finally there were companies like Friends of the Waters – all dedicated to building more dams, more roads, more museums, more harbor landfill, more airports for vegetables. By the end of the 1990s, there were thousands of brooms fetching water, most of it the color of red ink.
In Japan's case, unlike that of the sorcerer's apprentice, there is no wizard who knows the charm that will stop the brooms. The scale of public works on the drawing board for the next two or three decades is mind-boggling: 500 dams planned, beyond the more than 2,800 already built; 6,000 kilometers of expressways beyond the 6,000 already managed by the Highway PC; another 150,000 kilometers of mountain roads on top of the 130,000 kilometers already built by the Forestry Bureau. Nagara Dam, which resulted in three large river systems being concreted, was just for openers. «Why not go and connect those systems to Lake Biwa?» asks Takasue Hidenobu, the chairman of the Water Resources Public Corporation. For yet another Lovecraftian thrill, one need only look at a map of Japan to see what he is suggesting – nothing less than the demolition of a mountain range, as Lake Biwa sits on the far side of one, in a completely different prefecture from that of the Nagara Dam river systems. Meanwhile, Osaka Prefecture has plans to fill in all of Osaka Bay to a depth of fifteen meters. The music is building to a crescendo.
The process has the insistent quality of Japan's march to war in the 1930s. Inose Naoki writes:
At the moment, our citizens are waiting again for the "End of the War." Before World War II, when Japan advanced deeply into the continent, it was like the expansion of bad debts [today], and unable to deal with the consequences, we plunged into war with the United States. We should have been able to halt at some stage, yet even though we were headed for disaster, nobody could prevent it. At this point, lacking an «Imperial Decree,» there is absolutely nothing we can do to stop what is going on.
