According to this article, pointed out by the angry-but-vigilant WhyJapanSucks, the current recession Japan is experiencing is primarily due to an unholy alliance between the Yukuza (Japanese mafia), Bankers, and Politicans. In fact, "A former U.S. lawman who has investigated scores of Japanese companies describes the ties between politicians, big business and yakuza as 'breathtaking.'"

Turns out as much as half the bad debt which caused the current recession were loans to the mafia:

Miyawaki, a Tokyo University Law School graduate, former spokesman for Prime Minister Yasuhiro Nakasone and former head of the National Police Agency's organized crime division, estimates that up to 50% of the bad debts held by Japanese banks could be impossible to recover because they involve organized crime and corrupt politicians.

Amazingly, it wasn't the case that the Yakuza approached the bankers. Instead, the bankers approached the Yakuza and their front companies! Of course, these "loans" are not so easy to collect:

In 1993, a killer gunned down the vice-president in charge of collecting bad loans at Hanwa Bank in Wakayama Prefecture east of Osaka. The following year another professional assassin shot and killed the vice-president in charge of bad-debt collection at Sumitomo Bank in Nagoya.

In addition, since 1997, seven ranking Japanese officials investigating banking industry irregularities or about to testify about Japan's bad-debt woes have died under mysterious circumstances. Most recently, in September 2000, Tadao Honma, a former director of the Bank of Japan, was found dead in a hotel room in Osaka. Two weeks earlier the 60-year-old had become president of Nippon Credit Bank, a bankrupt bank that had lent to Japanese gangsters. Although Honma had been examining some of those loans in the days before he died, and the hotel guest next door heard fighting in Honma's room, police judged his death a suicide by asphyxiation and did not conduct an autopsy.

In the wake of those killings and suspicious deaths, Japanese bankers greet advice to accelerate the clean-up of their bad debts by asking to whom they should turn for protection from organized crime. "The banks are still afraid of foreclosing on some companies because they are afraid of what the yakuza will do to them," says Robert Whiting, the author of Tokyo Underworld and an expert on Japanese organized crime. "On top of that there are a lot of LDP [the ruling Liberal Democratic Party] guys involved in this whole mess."

How are is Japanese law enforcement responding?

officers frequently end up as security guards in yakuza-dominated businesses in various industries, such as construction and shipping. And because patrolmen know years in advance that they'll need such sinecures, the temptation to treat the yakuza with kid gloves has brought about dozens of bribery scandals over the past decade. Says a former FBI agent: "The goal of the police in Japan is to manage and control organized crime, not eradicate it." Japan's public prosecutors and judges have been caught or implicated in a web of corruption scandals as well.

And this may be yet another export Japan sends over to us:

No less troublesome, former U.S. law-enforcement officials now working for U.S. financial institutions in Japan worry that the yakuza might try to parlay their grip on the world's second-largest economy into a global presence. Already, some former U.S. lawmen believe, the yakuza could have ploughed as much as $50 billion into U.S. financial markets alone.

Though some are plunging in, some are attempting to be more cautious:

U.S. investment banks leery of hurting their reputations have taken the unusual step of supplementing the accountants who do much of their due-diligence investigations with former FBI agents and other U.S. law-enforcement officials...

To begin with, they found yakuza active in literally every sector of the Japanese economy; not only in areas such as construction, entertainment and trucking that have long been suspected of heavy yakuza involvement, but in everything from chemicals to hospitals...

At the same time, almost half of the deals that crossed the desks of the former U.S. agents featured significant yakuza involvement...

The U.S. government, in its latest International Crime Threat Assessment, described the yakuza as one of "the world's largest and most powerful criminal syndicates," and singled out the Inagawakai for laundering money in the United States.

The former U.S. lawmen see good reason to worry. "I think the yakuza have enough invested in the U.S. market that if they took it out it would really cause a problem," says a former FBI agent. "The yakuza have their own investment bankers and accountants and lawyers that they have sponsored, educated and use... The financial markets offer more and more options that will make them more of a global problem if we are not careful."

American and other international businessmen: Beware!

In this little cautionary tale, lack of morality has caused a national recession. Is morality important? Yes, indeed. How do we get it? Do we just "evolve" as society, some day in distant future? Or do we look to the traditional means of instilling ethics?

You shouldn't have to guess my answer.