The Japanese pensions scandals
Tóm tắt
Japan has for a very long time been fretting over the serious implications of the rapid ageing of its population on the future viability of its pension provisions. It is therefore not surprising to learn that the worry has been compounded by the revelation of very serious scandals relating to both the pension system itself and to how it is operated. One of these scandals was the discovery during the early part of 2004 of the non-payment of mandatory pension premiums by those in the limelight, especially by politicians, some of whom were at the very helm. The second, gripping and leaving the entire nation aghast, was the mishandling by the Social Insurance Agency (SIA) of the documentation on the payment of national pension premiums, an act that in many cases rendered it impossible to trace the identities of those entitled to pension benefits. Indeed, the elections on 29 July 2007, for the Diet (parliament) Upper House and some vacant seats in the Lower House (the more powerful of the two chambers), were fought on precisely that very issue, and the outcome favoured the opposition parties, giving them control of the Upper House for the first time ever. The third concerns the discovery in 2008 of the falsification of pension records by SIA staff, the very people entrusted with the running of the system. As these scandals continue to reverberate, the purpose of this paper is to throw some light on them by revealing their very nature and implications. Before doing so, however, it may prove helpful to provide brief background information on the underlying problems with the Japanese pension system.
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In terms of the sexes, Japanese females rank fourth at 85.59 years (after Macau, Hong Kong and San Marino at 87.45, 84.69 and 85.64, respectively), whereas Japanese men rank fifth at 78.73 years (after Macau, Andorra, Singapore and Hong Kong at 81.36, 80.35, 79.29 and 79.07, respectively). Note that there have been constant changes in these ranking over the years, with Iceland for a very long time consistently at the top. See Figures A1 and A2 in the Appendix,The World Bank. (2008) World Development Indicators 08. Washington DC: World Bank, and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_life_ecpctancy.
See El-Agraa, A.M. (ed.) (2007) The European Union: Economics and Policies. Cambridge, New York and other places: Cambridge University Press, The eighth edition of The Economics of the European Community, which was published in 1980 by Philip Allan of Oxford and translated into Chinese (in November 1985) by Professor Dai Bing Ran, and several others, of Fudan University, Shanghai, P. R. of China. There, you will find an elaboration on this point and the fallacies regarding Japan being considered special in this context, including the claims about Japanese food being accredited for the county's longevity. For example, Japanese life expectancy is highest in Okinawa where the main diet is pork and the gap between Japanese female and male life expectancies is the widest in the world.
As reported in all the media. See, for example, the Mainichi Daily News, 31 December 2008.
Japan offers an extra tax reduction for having more than one child, but the amount is miniscule when the costs of raising a child continue to skyrocket in Japan. A full discussion of the reasons for these high costs for the period up to 1987 is available in El-Agraa, A.M. (1988) Japan's Trade Frictions: Realities or Misconceptions? Basingstoke and New York: Macmillan; St. Martins Press, However, the basic elements given there remain fully valid today.
The payment of pension contributions is mandatory for all Japanese from age 20 to 60.
El-Agraa, A.M. (2008) Public pension provision: A comparison of the British and Japanese systems, based on their university arrangements. Pensions: An International Journal 13 (1/2 double issue), May: pp. 25–48.
This is the case in all but a few countries. For example, New Zealand offers the full national pension after meeting the residential requirement of only 10 years, 5 of which must be after age 50.
See, inter alia, Shinkawa, T. (2003) The politics of pension retrenchment in Japan. The Japanese Journal of Social Security Policy 2 (2), December: pp. 25–33.
He served for 3.5 years (October 2000 to 7 May 2004) under both prime ministers Yoshiro Mori and Junichiro Koizumi.
Commenting on the system with particular reference to the concerns of the young, Naohiro Yashiro, president of the Japan Centre for Economic Research, told the Guardian that the scheme was a dinosaur. ‘[W]e can’t afford it now; we can’t feed the dinosaur any more. Younger generations will sooner or later launch a coup d’état because they cannot bear the increasing burden. We don’t know when that will happen, but this is a time-bomb that is sure to explode’.
The scandal was a symptom of broader dissatisfaction being fuelled not only by economic uncertainty, but also by hostility to re-emerging Japanese militarism (above). A series of polls have registered the opposition of a majority of Japanese to the dispatch of Japanese troops to Iraq. This hostility to the government, however, has not translated into full support for opposition parties and politicians, whose policies are not fundamentally different.
Ichirō Ozawa, formerly a chief secretary of the LDP, defected from the LDP, and he has been the president of Japan's main opposition party, the DPJ, since 2006. He is considered to be one of the most important figures in Japanese politics and has been involved in many of the key events of the past decade.
My city, Fukuoka, brides itself for being Japan's gate to Asia because the scholars dispatched for the learning and borrowing exercise left from here. Note that the ‘gate to Asia’ is very much akin to the British ‘us and the Continent!’.
There are many newspaper reports on this issue. They can be found in English in the Asahi, Japan Times, Yomiuri and the weekly Japanese Economy during the second week of September 2008.