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To understand how the monument frenzy can continue at fever pitch, we need to take another look at how these projects are funded. Where do the bureaucrats get their money? They get it from Zaito, or FILP (Fiscal Investment and Loan Program). Zaito is Japan's second budget, the shadow budget, through which MOF's Trust Fund Bureau draws on a huge pool of deposits in the postal-savings system to fund its agencies and programs-with almost no parliamentary overview. Zaito is the bureaucracy's private piggy bank.
Zaito works like this:The government grants tax exemptions and other preferential treatment to postal-savings accounts managed by local post offices; interest on postal-savings deposits is consistently higher than in the private sector. Lured by these higher interest rates and by the convenience of banking at post offices, the Japanese people have put more and more of their money into postal savings, to the extent that by the end of the twentieth century they accounted for about a third of all bank deposits in Japan.
This enormous pool of capital – trillions of dollars' worth – is handed over to MOF's Trust Fund Bureau to manage. With the funds from postal savings, pension funds, and other special accounts combined, the Trust Fund Bureau has, in effect, become the worlds largest government bank. It invests much of the money in Japanese government bonds, which helps to explain why these bonds, which paid interest of only 1 to 2 percent or less for most of the 1990s, still found buyers – or, at least, one large buyer, the government itself, using captive savings deposits managed by the Trust Fund Bureau.
With money like this at its disposal, how could MOF resist the temptation to dip into the honey pot? It didn't take long. In 1955, only three years after the American Occupation ended, MOF borrowed a little money from the Trust Fund Bureau to support certain items for which there was not enough allocation in the general budget; the purpose was obviously to get around the official budget process in the National Diet.
It worked all too well. By 1999, Zaito borrowings had skyrocketed to ¥52.9 trillion a
When these corporations and agencies found themselves unable to repay their Zaito borrowings, the tobashi started.
Tobashi, or «flying,» is a word we have met before as the term used by banks to describe the method whereby they pass bad loans on to subsidiaries, thus causing them to «fly» off the books. In the case of Zaito, MOF lent more money to Zaito borrowers to cover the interest payments. By 1997, troubled Zaito loans were estimated to be as high as ¥62 trillion, although even this is a conservative figure. These Zaito obligations, added to the cumulative deficits of the central and local governments, the «hidden debts» (such as ¥28 trillion for the old Japan National Railroad Resolution Trust), and the juggling of inter-governmental accounts, raise Japan's real national debt to a level higher in absolute value than the U.S. national debt, equal to as much as 150 percent of Japan's GNP.
To see where all the Zaito money went, one must step boldly into the swamp of bureaucratic finance. The breeding habits of tokushu hojin are remarkable: ninety-two tokushu hojin, grouped under various ministries, have spawned thousands of koeki hojin, of which the central government oversees 6,922 and regional governments 19,005. Amakudari run most of the koeki hojin associated with the government, while ex-officials and employee welfare funds of the various ministries own a major portion of their stock. The koeki hojin in turn breed grandchildren, owned by the same people: full-fledged private profit-making enterprises that, without having to make public bids, gain a large share of public-works contracts. The various corporations fall under the jurisdiction of different ministries, which use them like.cattle to be milked. MITI sponsors a herd of 901 hojin, the Ministry of Education 1,778. All these hojin feed on Zaito money. Their breeding ground is the ministries that oversee them. They have no natural predators. Their droppings take the form of huge pellets known as monuments.
At the top of the list is the Highway Public Corporation, Doro Kodan, the largest of all the swamp creatures, king of the jungle. To build and manage Japan's highways, it has an operating budget of ¥4.4 trillion, roughly half of which comes from road tolls and other highway receipts; Zaito borrowings supply the rest. (The Highway PC is in fact Zaito's single largest borrower.) Over the years, the Highway PC has sunk into a quagmire of unrepayable debt; its cumulative red ink had come to well over ¥20 trillion by the end of the century. At this level, it rivaled even the notorious Japan National Railroad debt (¥28 trillion) and by 2002 might even surpass it. This desperate financial situation lies behind the high tolls, such as the ¥1,700 charge to drive for three minutes over the bridge to the New Kansai Airport.
The management of highways has its profitable side, however-the operation of service and parking areas along the freeways, with their attendant food and drink concessions, as well as telephone and car-radio monopolies. These monopolies lend themselves to schemes whereby bureaucrats make money for themselves. Here's how it works: The Highway PC creates a koeki hojin known as the Highway Facilities Association, which owns and manages the thousands of service and parking areas and has a
What all these numbers tell us is that the retired bureaucrats from the Construction and Transport ministries who run the Highway PC have neatly removed the profits in road management from the Highway PC's budget and fu
Everywhere you look, you find parasitic tendrils sucking nourishment from the flow of Zaito money. The favorite technique is marunage, « tossing it on,» by which an agency midway in the food chain receives a contract from the government and then tosses the project on to a subcontractor. The agency receives hefty fees in spite of not having done any work.
An example of marunage is the New Development Materials Company, an enterprise in the purview of the Ministry of Posts and Telecommunications (MPT). Anyone who has been awarded a contract to build a new post office must order materials through this company, although its business is entirely marunage – it simply cha
The shell game goes on. Just as MOF found a way, via Zaito borrowings, to remove much of the budget from the overview of the Diet, individual ministries have found ways to raise money on their own account, thus bypassing MOF. A favorite technique is to establish a gambling venue from which the ministry takes a share of the proceeds via a koeki hojin. Thus the Transport Ministry has ¥6.6 billion at its disposal earned from boat racing, while MITI rakes in ¥16 billion from auto and bicycle racing. The police, meanwhile, make sums that dwarf those of all other ministries combined from their involvement with pachinko.
What happens to all this money is a mystery. In the case of MITI, the subsidiaries that handle the gambling earnings do not publish the names of the agencies to which they distribute the money. The official reason is that the United States might sue Japan at the World Trade Organization if it learned that MITI was subsidizing certain industries. The real reason is that most of the money flows to comfortable amakudari nests, such as the Industrial Research Center – the recipient of roughly $1 million a year for each of its twenty-three amakudari employees – for no work that anyone has been able to discover. A disgruntled MOF official remarked, «[Racing money] is not checked by MOF. It's MITI's pocket money. It's a warm bed of privilege that MITI will guard to the death.»
On the day the Bastille fell in 1789, Louis XVI went hunting and had a rather nice day; the news of the fall of the Bastille meant very little to him. In hindsight, we know that it was one of the pivotal events in world history and that it cost the king his head. But on that day hunting took priority, and in the evening the king wrote in his diary: «Aujourd'hui rien,» "Today, nothing."