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bureau chief he should become submissive toward the ministry's clients with a view to enhancing his own amakudari.
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Misono* Hitoshi asserts that the combination of early retirement and inadequate pensions has made government service ''only an apprenticeship for favorable employment after retirement."
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And Takeuchi Naokazu, a disgruntled former Ministry of Agriculture bureaucrat who quit and became active in the consumer movement, charges that the Budget Bureau of the Ministry of Finance has been known to increase the budget shares of ministries that were willing to find positions for retiring finance officers in the public corporations those ministries control, or among their clients.
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Actual corruption among higher officials in Japan has occurred but is uncommon. In general, the Japanese public places greater trust in the honesty of state officials than in the honesty of politicans or business leaders. Such petty corruption as does occurgifts from businessmen, golf club fees, dinner parties, junketsis more common among noncareer officials than among the higher bureaucrats, and was more common in the period of shortages in the 1950's than in later years.
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When such incidents do involve higher officials, the press and public are quick to condemn them. For example, charges of the misuse of public funds in several public corporations and efforts to apprehend the guilty were national causes célèbres during 1979 and 1980.
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And the press and opposition parties are very watchful. The
Mainichi
, for example, reports that "toward the end of November of 1973, Nozue Chimpei, a member of the House of Councillors, conducted a unique study. He and his staff examined the trash cans at the construction and transport ministries to study how conservation policies were being carried out. After seven days of investigation, they found that the trash cans at the two ministries were filled with empty bottles of Johnny Walker and other expensive foreign liquor, and empty gift boxes bearing the names of senders."
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The serious issue in Japan is not the occasional abuse of office by a higher official but a pattern of cooperation between the government and big business that may have unintended consequences. Throughout its modern history Japan has experienced a series of major governmental corruption scandals, the most famous of which are the Siemens case of 1914, the Yawata state steel works case of 1918, the Teijin case of 1934, the Showa* Denko* case of 1948, the shipbuilding bribery case of 1954, the Tanaka "money politics" case of 1974, and the Lockheed case of 1976. These are only the most sensational; numerous others have occurred, and four resulted in the fall of governments.
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Less flagrant but possibly more important have been incidents of
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seeming wholesale payoffs by the government to business interests with preferential access or advance knowledge: the "dollar-buying scandal" of 1931, the payments to munitions companies immediately following the defeat in 1945, and the Bank of Japan's dollar-buying policies at the time of the August 1971 "Nixon shock" (in the face of certain knowledge that the yen would be revalued). On August 27, 1971, alone the government paid out some $1.2 billionsix times the amount involved in 1931to purchase dollars that had already been devalued on the rest of the world's foreign exchange markets. Total Bank of Japan dollar purchases in 1971 came close to $6 billion at ¥360 = $1 instead of ¥308 = $1; this represented a gift to business concerns of almost $1 billion. Some writers have called this "institutionalized corruption"; others have argued that it was the government's attempt to soften the blow for industries that would henceforth be selling their products at less advantageous prices.
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The reemployment of retired government bureaucrats on the boards of industries currently designated as economically strategic also creates many opportunities for hand-in-glove relationships. A classic case was the so-called Hakone railroad war of the late 1950's between two big private railroad systems, Seibu and Tokyu*. The issues involved the development of tourist railroads and bus franchises in and around the Mount Fuji area, a rail route from Ito* to Shimoda, and tourist boats between Atami and Oshima* Island. In every instance the Ministry of Transportation gave approval or issued licenses to Tokyu. The explanation of informed observers was that the president of Tokyu, Goto* Keita (18821959)one of the pioneers of the railroad, hotel, and department store businesses in Japanwas also a former official of the government railways and a minister of transportation in the Tojo* cabinet. The vice-president of Tokyu and president of the Tokyu*-backed Toei* Film Company was Okawa* Hiroshi, also a veteran of the Japanese National Railways. The executive director of Tokyu and also president of Tokyu Rolling-Stock Company was Yoshitsugu Toshiji, who had served in the old Railroad Ministry for more than twenty years. In addition, Karasawa Tsutomu, the Tokyu managing director; Kawahara Michimasa, president of the Tokyu-affiliated Keihin Rapid Transit Company; Torii Kikuzo*, vice-president of the Tokyu-affiliated Sagami Railroad Company; Shibata Ginzo*, president of the Tokyu-affiliated Hakone-Tozan* Railroad Company; Kajiura Kojiro*, president of the Tokyu-affiliated Enoshima-Kamakura Electric Railway Company; and Kawai Kentaro*, president of the Tokyu-affiliated Shizuoka Railway Company, were all former officials of the Ministry of Railways or its postwar successor, the Ministry of Transporta-
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tion. It has been suggested that these "seniors" might have had some influence over the transportation officials who had to review Tokyu's * plans. Some incumbent officials might even have been thinking of entering the Tokyu* empire when they retired.
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Thus one reason for the private sector's participation in amakudari is the extensive licensing and approval authority (kyoninkaken) of the government. Companies believe that having former bureaucrats among their executives can facilitate obtaining licenses from the ministries. The Ministry of Construction exercises licensing authority over the building industry, the Ministry of Transportation over rail and air transport and the bus and taxi business, the Ministry of Finance over the banks, and MITI over the key industriessteel, electric power, and chemicals in the 1950's, automobiles and appliances in the 1960's, advanced electronics in the 1970's, computers, robots, and new sources of energy in the 1980's. With this in mind it becomes understandable that whereas during the 1950's and 1960's very few ex-MITI officials joined foreign-affiliated firms, during the 1970's, with MITI's new commitment to the "internationalization" of the Japanese economy, ex-MITI officials began to appear in Matsushita-America, IBM Japan, and Japan Texas Instruments.
86
It is misleading to consider this type of government-business relationship a form of "corruption"; it is, rather, an adaptation by private business to a particular governmental environment. The same adaptation occurs in other countries, although in the United States the preferred insiders are ex-congressmen rather than ex-bureaucrats (except in the defense industries). Thus, during the 1970's Albert Gore, Sr., a former senator, became a lawyer for Occidental Petroleum; Paul Rodgers, former chairman of a House public health subcommittee, became a member of the board of Merck and Company; and Brock Adams, former congressman and secretary of transportation, became a lawyer for Trans World Airlines.