Friday, Dec. 28, 2007

In the past year, Japan has been rocked by political turmoil — especially the devastating defeat of the ruling coalition in the July 29 Upper House election, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe's abrupt resignation in September and Mr. Yasuo Fukuda's ascent to power. An attempt to form a grand coalition between the Liberal Democratic Party and the Democratic Party of Japan shook domestic politics.

But it was irresponsible behavior by politicians and bureaucrats that had a more direct impact on people's lives and perceptions. The result was deepening public mistrust of them.

Perhaps the government's failure to deliver its promise on the pensions has most contributed to this deepening mistrust. Before the Upper House election, Mr. Abe pledged that the government would finish identifying some 50.95 million hard-to-identify pension premium payment records by the end of March 2008. He also promised that the work would continue until "the last person" is identified and the "last yen" is correctly paid. Mr. Fukuda took over Mr. Abe's promise.

But the government said this month it will be extremely difficult to identify 19.75 million records, about 38.8 percent of the total. It is further feared that current methods will not work for identifying 9.45 million of the 19.75 million records.

The question is why government leaders made such a pledge hastily if they knew that the identification work would not be easy. One wonders whether they are more interested in getting short-range political gains than correctly informing people. To make the matter worse, Mr. Fukuda said, "Is (the new revelation of the difficulty involved in the identification work) so grave a thing as to be characterized as reneging on a public pledge?" The root cause of the problem is the shoddy work by the Social Insurance Agency. But Mr. Fukuda cannot blame people for thinking that he does not understand their worries about the nation's pension system.

Before the pension records debacle, people saw politicians' irresponsible behavior concerning their political funds. Farm minister Toshikatsu Matsuoka's political fund management organization reported spending ¥28.8 million on utilities for five years through 2005 even though it was located in a Diet office where rent and utilities are free. He offered a ridiculous excuse that the use of a water purifier cost a lot. He eventually killed himself without offering a convincing explanation.

His successor Norihiko Akagi was fired also over an office expense scandal. Mr. Akagi's successor Takehiko Endo resigned, only a week after taking office, over illegal receipt of state subsidies by a farmers' association that he heads. By late December 2006, administrative reform minister Genichiro Sata had resigned over accounting irregularities involving his support organization. But oddly enough, Mr. Abe would not take the initiative to strengthen control of political funds management.

The arrest of former Vice Defense Minister Takemasa Moriya on bribery charges not only damaged the morale of the Self-Defense Forces members but also caused people to doubt the ethical standards of the ministry's bureaucracy. He is suspected of having received not only some ¥3.9 million worth of entertainment — mainly in the form of golf outings — on 12 occasions over three years since 2003 from a defense equipment trading businessman, but also a cash bribe of some ¥3.63 million.

The ethical dimension of his arrest is grave because Mr. Moriya served as the top bureaucrat of the Defense Agency and the Defense Ministry for four years and was instrumental in upgrading the agency to a ministry status and working out the realignment of the U.S. forces in Japan. Ironically, Mr. Moriya played a central role in writing the SDF's ethical code when he was head of the agency's secretariat.

The Meat Hope Co. scandal, one of a string of scandals involving food-related firms, also highlighted bureaucratic irresponsibility. The farm ministry insists that it tipped off the Hokkaido Prefectural Government about the meat company's actions in March 2006, but the latter denies receiving it. And a former Meat Hope employee also took mislabeled meat to the ministry's Hokkaido office twice in April 2006, but the office chose not to act.

The problem of how to compensate people infected with hepatitis C from tainted blood products, mainly the hemostatic agent fibrinogen, can be traced to past government carelessness. In 1977, the United States withdrew its approval of fibrinogen. Despite an outbreak of infections in Aomori Prefecture in 1987, the government approved a new type of fibrinogen with an increased risk of infection because of a change in its anti-virus method.

Policy blunders by the government make people's life difficult. But politicians and bureaucrats must realize that their irresponsible and unethical behavior will have a more serious effect of undermining the backbone of the state.

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