A Clean Kill in Tokyo

bureaucrats pass and interpret laws that can make or break domestic corporations. And the corporations provide over half the media’s advertising revenues. So if, for example, a newspaper runs an article that offends a politician, the politician calls his contacts at the relevant corporations, who in turn pull their advertising from the newspaper and transfer it to a rival publication, and the offending paper goes bankrupt. You see? If you have a reporter investigate a story from outside the government-sponsored
kisha
news clubs, you get shut down. If you play ball, the money keeps rolling in, licit and illicit. No one here takes chances; everyone treats the truth like a contagious disease. That’s why Japan’s press is the most docile in the world.”
    “But with proof…?” I asked.
    “Hard proof would change everything. The papers would be forced to cover the story or else reveal they’re nothing but tools of the government. And flushing the corrupt kingpins out into the open would weaken them and embolden the press. We could start a virtuous cycle that would lead to a change in Japanese politics the likes of which the country hasn’t seen since the Meiji Restoration.”
    “I think you may be overestimating the zeal of domestic media,” Midori said.
    Bulfinch shook his head. “Not at all. I know some of these people well. They’re good journalists and they want to publish. But they’re realists, too.”
    “The proof,” I said. “What was it?”
    Bulfinch looked at me over the tops of his wireless glasses. “I don’t know exactly. Only that it’s hard evidence. Incontrovertible.”
    “It sounds like that disk should go the
Keisatsucho,
not the press,” Midori said, referring to Tatsu’s investigative organization.
    “Your father wouldn’t have lasted a day if he’d handed that information over to the police,” I said, saving Bulfinch the trouble.
    “That’s right,” Bulfinch said. “Your father wasn’t the first person to try to blow the whistle on corruption. Ever hear of Honma Tadayo?”
    Ah, yes, Honma-san. A sad story.
    Midori shook her head.
    “When Nippon Credit Bank went bankrupt in 1998,” Bulfinch went on, “at least thirty-six billion, and probably much more, of its hundred-and-thirty-three-billion-dollar loan portfolio had gone bad. The bad loans were linked to the underworld, even to illegal payments to North Korea. To clean up the mess, a consortium of rescuers hired Honma Tadayo, the respected former director of the Bank of Japan. Honma-san became president of NCB in early September and started working through the bank’s books, trying to bring to light the full extent of its bad debts and understand where and why they had been extended in the first place.”
    I thought of Tatsu and his conspiracy theories, my eyes unblinking behind my shades.
    “Honma lasted two weeks. He was found hanged in an Osaka hotel room, with notes addressed to his family, company, and others nearby. His body was quickly cremated, without an autopsy, and the Osaka police ruled the death a suicide without even conducting an investigation.”
    I knew these details well. Hearing Bulfinch recite them wasn’t making me particularly comfortable.
    “And Honma wasn’t an isolated event. His death was the seventh ‘suicide’ among ranking Japanese either investigating financial irregularities or due to testify about irregularities since 1997, when the depth of bad loans affecting banks like Nippon Credit first started coming to light. There was also a member of parliament who was about to talk about irregular fund-raising activities, another Bank of Japan director who oversaw small financial institutions, an investigator at the Financial Supervision Agency, and the head of the small and medium financial institutions division at the Ministry of Finance. Not one of these seven cases resulted in so much as a homicide investigation. The powers that be in this country don’t allow it.”
    These were also matters with which I was intimately familiar.
    “There are rumors of a special outfit within the yakuza,” Bulfinch said, taking off his glasses and wiping the lenses on his shirt, “specialists in ‘natural causes,’ who visit victims at night in hotel rooms, force them to write wills at gunpoint, inject them with sedatives, then strangle them in a way that makes it appear the victims committed suicide by hanging.”
    “Have you found any substance to the rumors?” I asked.
    “Not yet. But