‘Souvenir’ Scandal Rocks Japan: Premier Rewards New Diet Members With 100,000-Yen Gift Certificates

This scandal is rocking Japan: As a “souvenir” for getting elected for the first time to the Japanese diet, or parliament, the 15 newcomers each got a gift certificate good for 100,000 yen, or $667, worth of shopping at Japan’s opulent department stores.What a fitting reward: Not so big as to look like an enormous bribe of the sort that politicians are always getting in other Asian countries, not so small as to seem trivial, soon forgotten. Japan’s prime minister, Shigeru Ishiba, was full of kind words and fatherly advice as he welcomed the 15 new members of the long-ruling Liberal-Democratic Party, at a a lavish “private dinner” of “mitten crab and wild games meat” at his “official residence,” according to one of Japan’s leading national dailies, Asahi Shimbun. “We are Ishiba children,” one of the fledgling lawmakers piped up. It seemed only fitting, then, for the genial host’s aides to keep all the guests in a good mood by handing each of them a “souvenir” — an envelope containing the gift certificate.Ever since Asahi exposed the gift-giving, Mr. Ishiba, elected by the diet in a run-off last September, has been up to his neck in hot water, much of it promoted by Asahi.“Ishiba folly may drain his last pool of strength: public support,” the paper said in an editorial. The prime minister “has adamantly maintained that he broke no laws when he distributed gift certificates,” the editorial said. “Yet, no matter how many times he repeats, ‘There is no legal issue,’ such a defense is unlikely to resonate with the public.”Beset by opposition to his budget, Mr. Ishiba has had to go through the ordeal of saying sorry and explaining himself in diet hearings that won’t get him into legal trouble but may jeopardize his job in the merry-go-round of Japanese politics, in which prime ministers often last only a year or two.Mr. Ishiba “acknowledged being out of touch with public sentiment and apologized for causing trouble,” the national news agency, Kyodo, reported. “But he said the vouchers he paid for were intended as tokens of appreciation, not donations.”Nor was it the first time he had handed out such “envelopes” during a long career in politics and government. He has previously served as defense minister while trying and failing several times to become prime minister. All told, he said, he had handed out gift certificates on 10 occasions.Politicians from minor opposition parties loved it. The leader of the tiny Democratic Party for the People, Yuichiro Tamaki, said Mr. Ishiba “cannot stay on as prime minister” if he is unable to “dispel suspicions.”Making the gift-giving look even worse was that the LDP was still living down a much bigger scandal from when Mr. Ishiba’s predecessor, Fumio Kishida, was prime minister. Politicians were disclosed to have transferred donations into “slush funds” from which they were said to be helping themselves to kickbacks. Mr. Yoshida himself, during the furor over Mr. Ishiba’s gifts to his elected followers, admitted he too had given gift certificates. Lost in the headlines is that Japan ranks among the world’s less corrupt countries. A German rating firm, Transparency International, ranks Japan as the world’s 16th, behind the mostly clean-living countries of northern Europe plus Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. America comes in at 24th, tied with Barbados but ahead of Bhutan. Japan ranks as easily the least corrupt of Asian powers. South Korea ranks respectably at 32nd in the Transparency listing, and China is 76th, but most other Asian countries, in which payoffs are a way of life, rank much further down. In Japan, a land of law and order, those comparisons don’t count. The leader of the Constitutional Democratic Party of Japan, Yoshihiko Noda, who served as prime minister in 2011 and 2012, called the gift-giving “an issue with the LDP’s political culture” — one that he might wish to exploit in a bid to stage a comeback and loosen the LDP’s historic grip on power.

‘Souvenir’ Scandal Rocks Japan: Premier Rewards New Diet Members With 100,000-Yen Gift Certificates

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