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Japan Forces Bureaucrats to Defend Spending
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| Contributor | particleman |
| Last Edited | particleman Apr 30, 2010 09:15pm |
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| Category | News |
| Author | HIROKO TABUCHI |
| Media | Newspaper - New York Times |
| News Date | Saturday, May 1, 2010 03:00:00 AM UTC0:0 |
| Description | TOKYO — Seeking to bring its spiraling debt under control, Japan has undertaken an unlikely exercise: lawmakers are forcing bureaucrats to defend their budgets at public hearings and are slashing wanton spending.
The hearings, streamed live on the Internet, are part of an effort by the eight-month-old government of Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama to tackle the country’s public debt, which has mushroomed to twice the size of Japan’s $5 trillion economy after years of profligate spending.
Greece’s debt crisis, which has panicked investors and forced the rest of Europe to put together a multibillion-dollar bailout, has fed fears in Tokyo that if spending is unchecked, Japan could become the center of the next global financial crisis.
The target of the most recent hearings, which began Friday, is Japan’s web of quasi-government agencies and public corporations — nonprofits that draw some 3.4 trillion yen ($36 billion) in annual public funds, but operate with little public scrutiny.
The daily testimony by cowering bureaucrats, covered extensively in local media, has given the Japanese their first-ever detailed look at state spending. So far, viewers have looked on in disbelief over the apparent absurdity of some of the government spending.
In one example scrutinized on Tuesday, the National Agriculture and Food Research Organization, which is government financed, spent 130 million yen ($1.4 million) last year on a 3-D movie theater used to show footage of scenery from the countryside.
The movie dome, which also plays recordings of chirping insects and babbling streams, is closed to the public and is used to study how the human brain reacts to different types of scenery, said Takami Komae, head of the organization’s rural engineering department. The findings will be used to help rural areas think of ways to attract more tourists, he testified.
Politicians ridiculed the project. “The dome is located in the countryside anyway, isn’ |
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