Japanese muckraker energizes revived opposition
By Norimitsu Onishi The New York Times
Saturday, July 19, 2008
He has a crusader’s intensity, rarely cracking a smile and dispensing of the politician’s need to win over a visitor. No, for Akira Nagatsuma, an opposition lawmaker who was once a reporter, the goal at hand was clear: breaking Japan’s one-party state by rooting out hidden information.
Whether by chasing after tips he receives daily on his cellphone, prying secrets out of the all-powerful bureaucracy or going for the jugular in parliamentary debates, Nagatsuma, 48, has become the nation’s chief muckraker. He again grabbed front-page headlines a few weeks ago by exposing the widespread practice among elite bureaucrats of using taxpayers’ money to ride in taxis for their often-long commute home at night, and accepting drinks, gifts and even cash as kickbacks from drivers looking for repeat customers.
The revelations surrounding the "pub taxis," as they became known, made him an even more feared figure among bureaucrats. And they elevated his standing among ordinary voters who first heard of him last year when he uncovered massive bureaucratic mishandling of the national pension records.
His dogged pursuit of the pension problems earned him the nickname "Mr. Pension" and helped his Democratic Party seize Parliament’s upper house last summer. Voter anger against the governing Liberal Democratic Party eventually led to the downfall of Shinzo Abe, the former prime minister, and to something that postwar Japan had never experienced: a divided Parliament.
Used to half a century of nearly continuous rule by the Liberal Democrats, Japanese voters remain uneasy with the present political situation, which the news media uniformly describe negatively as a "twisted Parliament." And indeed, with no history of bipartisanship, Prime Minister Yasuo Fukuda and his Liberal Democrats have struggled to pass even the most basic of laws. For the first time, they have had to deal with an opposition with real powers.
"I think that’s the best possible thing," Nagatsuma said, "because we are getting closer to what basic democracy should be. Strictly speaking, democracy still hasn’t taken root in Japan."
So Nagatsuma sees possibilities in the so-called twisted Parliament.
The opposition’s control over the upper house has led to substantial debates over policy, though the governing party has used its grip over the more powerful lower house to ram through some legislation.
The change has also given his party’s committee chairmen in the upper house the legal authority to investigate the workings of government by summoning witnesses or demanding documents. Even though that power is seldom exercised and Nagatsuma himself is a member of the lower house, he said that his party’s new standing has made bureaucrats more responsive to his demands for information, though not as responsive as he wished.
"Compared to before, they’re somewhat more willing to disclose information," he said. "We’re talking of a change from 1 out of 10 times to 2 out of 10. I think that, for an advanced nation, that’s just unbelievable. No other country hides government documents the way Japan does."
When he was reminded that a change from one to two times was double the previous rate, Nagatsuma smiled - the only time during an hour-long interview at his office.
With documents piled high on a chair, stored inside boxes on his desk and floor and bound in folders titled "pension," the office had the cluttered look of a reporter’s workspace. Located inside one of the two buildings housing members of the lower house, it was tiny, like all the other offices, with an even tinier waiting room where his staff worked and guests waited.
Unlike their American counterparts, Japanese lawmakers don’t have the office space, let alone budget, to hire enough staff for serious legislative work. They depend on bureaucrats within the various ministries to provide information, research issues, write speeches and, of course, draft laws.
As scholars of Japanese politics have long pointed out, that situation has created a cozy - and often collusive - relationship between bureaucrats and the Liberal Democrats. About 20 percent of the party’s lower house legislators are former bureaucrats, a far higher percentage than in the opposition. In return, bureaucrats, who are supposed to be neutral public servants, have long favored the governing party and treated the opposition dismissively.
"If the bureaucracy is a horse," Nagatsuma said, "politicians and the people are riding the horse without holding the reins. We’re just sitting on the horse and letting it decide the country’s direction."
In a legislative body where a quarter of his colleagues inherited their seats from their fathers or relatives, Nagatsuma came to politics in a roundabout way. After college, he joined NEC, the electronics giant, because he was inspired by the company’s project at the time to build an automatic language interpretation machine that would contribute to world peace.
But as a young salaryman, he read Nikkei, the country’s main economic newspaper, and became interested in journalism. He applied successfully for a reporting post at the newspaper’s magazine, Nikkei Business, and tortured himself over whether to make the jump.
"My wife scolded me by saying that if I really wanted to go, I should make up my mind and just go," he recalled.
Few members of his generation would have left a prestigious company to pursue such an interest, and he was unsure he had made the right choice.
"My editors told me I wrote more poorly than a junior high school student," he said. "They told me, ’You’ve chosen the wrong path.’ One time, I wrote and rewrote something 30 times without sleeping for 70 hours."
After two years, though, he found that his strengths lay in ferreting out information. He had an epiphany when he was reporting on Japanese banks’ nonperforming loans. When he went to a Finance Ministry official for information, he was told "not to stir anxiety" by writing about the loans.
As an opposition lawmaker since 2000, he still found the bureaucracy was closed to him. But using his reporter’s investigative skills, he began probing health bureaucrats’ misuse of public funds. That drew the ire of some health officials who, an investigation found later, attacked him on his Japanese Wikipedia entry while on duty.
The investigation also led to tips and to his big scoop that health officials had mishandled or simply lost the pension records of tens of millions of Japanese. The governing party first tried to hide the fact, then made matters worse by trying to make light of it.
Nowadays, he receives up to 30 e-mail messages a day and acts on the most promising tips, like the one about the "pub taxis."
To squeeze answers out of bureaucrats, he has had to hone his questioning techniques. One bureaucrat initially denied having received any gifts from drivers but later admitted accepting department store gift certificates.
Why?
The bureaucrat said he had been asked whether he had ever accepted a "kickback," but he argued the certificates were "year-end gifts."
"They’ll never tell the truth unless you ask 100 questions, or you find a concrete case on your own," Nagatsuma said.
"Japanese bureaucrats won’t tell a direct lie," he added. "But they won’t say anything beyond what they’ve been asked. They’ll never volunteer anything. If you put it to them like this - ’How about this? Yes or no?’ - then they won’t lie."
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