TOKYO, Sept. 26, 2023—By coincidence, this reporter Sept. 26, 2023 stumbled into a website of an obscure entity called Nippon.com that clearly functions as a venues for providing offices and compensations for sitting there to retired bureaucrats and media old boys.
Nippon.com website (https://foundation.nippon.com/en/) lists Kiyotaka Akasaka, who had served as the head of the Foreign Press Center (https://fpcj.jp/en/) and a former official of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs as representative director. A former vice minister for international finance, Rintaro Tamaki who concurrently heads the Japan Center for International Finance (JCIF), sits as a trustee. Two Japanese newspaper editor/guest columnists (Akio Takahata of Sankei and Yoshiaki Ito of Mainichi newspapers) are on the board. Nippon Foundation and its sister organization Sasakawa Peace Foundation, which partially finance Nippon.com, have two seats on the board.
Nippon.com is a typical Japanese nonprofit in that that it is an entity vetted by government as a public interest organization that agrees to be under bureaucracy influence. As mentioned, it also provides comfortable heated seats to former top bureaucrats and those that cluster around them. Board and trustee officers receive salaries, expenses, and retirement benefits, Nippon.com said. Its mission statement says: ‘The Nippon Communications Foundation produces Nippon.com with one goal in mind: to share Japan, as it stands today, with the entire world.’ (BS and blushed.)
Nippon.com’s fiscal 2023 budget was 857 million yen ($$5.7 million), of that, government subsidies were 788 million yen ($5.2 million) and operation revenues accounted for only 89 million yen, reflecting that Nippon.com life is on subsidies. But executive compensation and salaries looked relatively generous at 286 million yen ($1.9 million). Officers and employees also receive health insurance and other social benefits.
Now, does anyone heard about Nippon.com, which was formerly called Japan Echo founded by the government decades ago. The site does have interesting looking articles but hardly of nature that can match those of journalism. It offers articles in a multiple number of languages, including Russian, but access seems to be limited — another example of bureaucracy first that leads Japan further away from the real world.
It’s the way to go for retired bureaucrats!
###