According to a recent survey by Transparency International, 52 percent of Japanese identified political parties as the primary source of corruption in Japan. Surprisingly, or perhaps worrying, this figure was second only to Argentina (at 58 percent) and far ahead of both Colombia and India - both usually perceived as more politically corrupt.
There is a persistent myth in Japanese studies that politicians are dirty but bureaucrats are clean. Though bureaucrats have been involved in all of the major post-war scandals and have been the primary culprits in many, the myth persists.
Nonsense is hard to stomach, no matter who dishes it out, but it is especially distasteful when disingenuously offered up by a government in the guise of an official report. Japan's Foreign Ministry (Gaimusho) recently issued such a report, on a senior official's embezzlement of huge sums from a secret fund ostensibly designed to help diplomats build relations with foreign countries. The official, Katsutoshi Matsuo, headed the Gaimusho's Overseas Visit Support Division between October 1993 and August 1999, where he helped organize trips by prime-ministers, diplomats, and other high-ranking governmental officials. But Matsuo routinely deposited secret Gaimusho funds in his personal bank accounts, from which he then paid for his own trips and trysts with various mistresses. He also purchased eight golf club memberships, five of which together cost 43 million yen, fifteen racehorses for some 140 million yen, and a luxury condominium in Tokyo's Bunkyo ward for a mere 80 million yen. Until his arrest in late January, 2001, Matsuo had obviously been living beyond his salaried means.
Readers of the Japanese press may recall similar revelations about fiscal misconduct in other parts of Japan's bureaucracy. To take only the most troubling example, the creation of slush funds-- uragane-- by cooking the books through illicit accounting -- fusei keiri -- has been practiced for decades by Japan's most powerful administrative agency: the police.4 Notwithstanding the prevailing view that police in Japan are as pure as the driven snow, the evidence that they misuse tax money is abundant. In 1984, for example, Tadamitsu Matsuhashi, a former supervisor of superintendents in the National Police Agency, wrote a book revealing that "police organizations all over Japan are manufacturing slush funds."5 In subsequent years reporters have documented police slush-fund crimes in Tokyo, Nagoya, Nagasaki, and elsewhere.6 In just the last two years, emboldened by revelations in several police scandals, ex-cops have authored books documenting how police organizations systematically divert money from their budgets to cover under-the-table transfers to senior police officials and to pay for gifts, entertainment, and other illicit purposes.7
Police Corruption
When silence fails to quell the criticism the police resort to their second strategy: they issue nonsensical "reports" of the kind the Foreign Ministry recently produced. These reports pin police problems on one or a few individuals, thereby denying the need for change in the police's organizational culture and the need for creating external organs that would hold police more accountable for how they spend their huge budget and exercise their formidable powers.
In December 2000, Japan's Management and Coordination Agency finally said enough is enough. For the first time in the postwar period it conducted an administrative inspection of the police and issued a report and advisory of its own. The latter mandates that police redo their inquiry into police misconduct and produce another report, minus the nonsense.10 Time will tell whether the police comply. I am hopeful but not optimistic. There is plenty of reason for pessimism. At the end of the year 2000, for example, during which Japan had experienced an unprecedented number of police scandals, the Asahi Shimbun surveyed thirteen prefectural police departments in order to ask what they considered the year's top ten news stories from their respective beats. Almost all the departments responded with resounding success stories, from big cases cracked to well-run security at official events. As one cop critic succinctly summarizes the situation, everyone fears the police but the police fear no one.11
Police corruption is a double problem: it reinforces a culture of secrecy and deceit that is itself a breeding ground for police abuses ranging from perjury to brutality, and it prevents police from properly enforcing criminal laws against other bureaucratic wrongdoers. Police responses to allegations of misconduct take two main forms. Usually they attempt to "kill complaints with silence" (mokusatsu suru), in large part because police managers strictly enforce a code of silence against their subordinates. As former Tokyo Metropolitan Police officer Akio Kuroki has written, cops who tell tales out of class, no matter how truthful, are certain to suffer severe career consequences.9
Criminal policy can be divided into hard criminal policy and soft criminal policy. This is the so-called bifurcation in penal policy described by Professor Bottoms 194 .
The hard criminal policy should be used for serious crimes and maintained in the constitution, if we want to maintain a legal system and a state based on the rule of law, and to guarantee the rights of victims. On the other hand, the soft crimin'1l policy will be vet-y effective for minor offences. Under this criminal policy various alternative penal sanctions should be applied and discussed under such categories as diversion programs, de-criminalisation theory and non-intervention theory." 195 This paper is based on exactly these points of view.
If the state is to control power over penal sanctions, the ultima ratio principle of penal sanctions should be always considered and observed.
infomation: http://www.jpri.org/publications/workingpapers/wp76.html
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Japan/EH05Dh02.html
photo: http://headlines.yahoo.co.jp/hl?a=20071219-00000001-maip-soci.view-000
posted by Yuuki Takikawa
