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Episode 428 - The Highest Bidder
🕑 Added 2022-03-04 17:03:45 +0000 UTC[Edit: looks like during the writing process some of my notes got overwritten by an accidental copy-paste as I was moving things around. Thanks to folks who let me know and sorry for the delay in fixing it.]
The research for this episode was a lot of fun to research for all the reasons I mentioned. A good scandal is always deeply entertaining, and I find the Siemens one particularly interesting because of how much it reveals regarding the politics of the era. I did have to leave some things on the cutting room floor just due to length; for example, there's a whole sub-section of the scandal revolving around a Reuters correspondent in Japan who found out about the bribery and took hush money in exchange for keeping it quiet, only to get exposed later when word got out anyway. His name is Andrew Pooley, and you can find some reference to him in the show notes (his wife was apparently harassed by the press once the scandal broke).
I also find Yamamoto Gonnohyoe an interesting figure in his own right. If you look at the Japanese video linked in the show notes, you'll find that one of the comments on it says something like, "he didn't take any money and was still punished, how sad" or something along those lines. It certainly reads to me like Yamamoto himself was not corrupt, and his reform to the way army and navy minsterial posts worked was a big shift in terms of making the civilian government more independent (so much so that it was reversed during the years of militarized government). Yet Yamamoto was also very cynical about using politics as a way to get more money for the navy. These facts make thinking about his motivations rather compelling, at least for me.
Lastly, I find the similarity between the Siemens Scandal and the Lockheed Scandal in terms of who broke the news very interesting. In both cases it was foreign investigators, not Japanese ones, who found evidence of corruption which then led to a massive investigation and scandal. This, I think, goes a long way to demonstrating the longstanding presence in the Japanese government of two attitudes. First, there's the desire to avoid being shamed for 'dirty laundry', so to speak--to cover up things that make the state look bad rather than trying to root them out. And second, once things do get out, there's the desire to resolve the issue ASAP. These are certainly not attitudes unique to the Japanese state, but seeing their persistence over such a long span of time (and substantial change in the leadership) is interesting nonetheless.
