The unspoken word behind a string of Japanese scandals

On first viewing, little connects a scandal-soaked kindergarten, the fraudulently padded accounts of Toshiba and a trio of sacked news anchors. But a seldom-used Japanese word, dredged from way outside normal working vocabularies and abruptly foisted on the mainstream, is beginning to make some sense of it all. Sontaku refers to the pre-emptive, placatory following of an order that has not been given.

The word may not (until now) be widely used by Japanese, but everyone instinctively gets its sinuous prevalence in both government and private sectors. And while the concept is not uniquely Japanese, few terms resonate so well in explaining Japan in the era of Prime Minister Shinzo Abe.

Sontaku’s lurch into the vernacular coincided with a political scandal that has personally embroiled Mr Abe and his wife, and represents the most sustained threat to his leadership since becoming Prime Minister four years ago.

At the heart of the scandal is a deal whereby a nationalistic private kindergarten, of which Mrs Abe was honorary principal, was sold state-owned land for a tiny fraction of its appraised value.

Mr Abe, his approval ratings sliding on the scandal, bit back with a promise to resign if any evidence linked either him or his wife to the deal. That suggests he knows full well how sontaku works, and how his specific grip on power — all the more striking after a parade of seven prime ministers in as many years — has fed its revival in government and bureaucratic circles.

No evidential trail of orders to sell the land on the cheap is likely to be found, say the sontaku theorists, because the orders existed only as a chain of ingratiating conjectures about what Mr Abe and his wife might favour.

With sontaku suddenly dominating newspaper headlines and implying a system corrupted through governance-by-guesswork, Mr Abe himself deployed the S-word. “There is no room for sontaku to take place,” he declared on Monday as the kindergarten scandal refused to die down.

But with the term now out in the ether, people have started to notice it in action elsewhere.

Media analysts dissecting last year’s sudden, almost simultaneous sacking from three separate television stations of three news anchors who had been critical of Mr Abe saw sontaku as the culprit.

Television bosses do not need to be ordered to do anything, say journalists at the affected channels, when they are so good at surmising wishes.

Many Japanese journalists, bridling at what they see as tightening constraints endured since Mr Abe came to power, quietly use the word sontaku as a synonym for “self-censoring”.

Corporate Japan has, meanwhile, produced hundreds of strong chief executives, many with their own sontaku-inducing aura.

When brake manufacturer Akebono produced a report on its 2015 profit-overstating scandal, it openly blamed overzealous, pre-emptive intention-reading by people in the accounts department.

Analysis of Toshiba’s deepening crisis cannot be far from deploying the sontaku explanation. The conglomerate’s own analysis of its monster, company-wide US$1.3 billion (S$1.8 billion) account-padding scandal stops short of mentioning the phenomenon by name but leaves unmistakable hints that it was in play, referring obliquely to the “will of superiors” and the contortions undertaken to satisfy it.

In many ways sontaku is a classic cop-out — an excuse for wrongdoing that joins “groupthink” and “reflexive obedience” on the list of Japanese self-criticisms that neatly dilute individual responsibility in the well of cultural explanation.

A critical difference, though, is that sontaku has a genuine knack of identifying centres of power.

If it were indeed at work in the case of the kindergarten, Mr Abe’s current discomfort can be read as a direct consequence of the way in which he has successfully consolidated huge individual power in a political environment that had, for many years, seemed completely immune to that.FINANCIAL TIMES

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Leo Lewis is Tokyo Correspondent for the Financial Times.