Por fin "The Economist" informa sobre la corrupción

http://www.economist.com/world/asia/displaystory.cfm?story_id=16167646

A political slush fund in Japan
If you pay more than peanuts
You may get wise monkeys: the Japanese press ignores a juicy story

May 20th 2010 TOKYO From The Economist print edition

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IN MANY parts of the world, journalists would be unable to resist a good political slush-fund scandal. In Japan, information is dribbling out about a murky stash of cash kept in a black box near the prime minister’s office that for decades has been used to curry political favour—even, it is said, among journalists and television commentators. Tellingly, the Japanese media are reacting to the scandal like the three wise monkeys of Nikko: see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil.

The existence of the fund has long been known to insiders. Now, for the first time, a sitting government has admitted to its existence. In a letter to the Japanese Communist Party (JCP) on May 14th, Hirofumi Hirano, chief cabinet secretary in the government of Yukio Hatoyama, has confirmed he withdrew ¥360m ($3.8m) between September and March, and returned an unused portion of just ¥16m to the exchequer. Asked by a JCP lawmaker in parliament in March what record he had kept of the expenditure, he helpfully replied: “It is in my mind.”

Mr Hirano says he has no plans for the time being to disclose what the money was spent on, for fear of damaging “the national interest”. Nor does he expect to stop dipping into the pot. He also appeared reluctant to investigate the outgoing administration of Taro Aso, which raided the fund last year just before it handed over power to Mr Hatoyama. Two days after the election, and two weeks before leaving office, it withdrew ¥250m.

The mainstream press has been strangely reticent on the matter. Besides a long article in the Communist-leaning RedFlag, the scandal has received just snippets of coverage in national newspapers. That may be for fear of being smeared by their own story. Last month, Hiromu Nonaka, one of Mr Hirano’s predecessors as chief cabinet secretary, revealed that between 1998 and 1999 he spent up to ¥70m ($600,000 at the exchange rate of the time) per month from his secret little piggy bank. That included ¥10m for the prime minister and ¥10m for politicians in the then-ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP). But it also included money strewn among press commentators and members of opposition parties. Some was splurged on sending them on trips to North Korea.

The 84-year-old Mr Nonaka made the confession, he said, because he did not want to carry the secret to the grave about what he rightly referred to as taxpayers’ money. But he may have been making mischief, too, for Mr Hatoyama’s Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ), which drove the LDP from power last year on a platform of transparency and accountability.

Takao Toshikawa, editor of Tokyo Inside Line, a political newsletter, who once wrote a book on slush funds, says he doubts pay-offs still go to the media. But he adds that there is a rumour that some slush-fund largesse has been lavished on wining and dining residents of Okinawa, notably those who oppose the government’s plan to relocate an American marine base on their island.

Some people might shrug off such funds as part of the old Japanese tradition of gift-giving, albeit involving some rather generous presents. But for a government that has long promised to dig up the “buried treasure” hidden in such secret accounts to improve public finances, it is extraordinary that it, too, is taking such brazen advantage of this darkest of slush funds. Just as extraordinary, not to mention suspicious, is the impressive silence from most of the powerful mass media. More evidence, if it were needed, of the central role they play in Japan’s longstanding political dysfunction.


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