HOW HE SEES IT Japanese speaking their minds

By DANIEL SNEIDER
KNIGHT RIDDER NEWSPAPERS
In Japan, government has long been king.
The mandarins of the elite bureaucracy rank among the most powerful. Along with the politicians of the long-ruling conservative party and business interests, they form what is called the Iron Triangle. When it comes to making public policy, outside voices rarely penetrate.
But the iron is showing plenty of rust these days. While ordinary Japanese count their yen, they are outraged by bureaucrats downing sake at Tokyo's finest eateries with the businessmen they supposedly oversee. Revelations of political corruption and chicanery have become commonplace.
Citizens are no longer content to leave policy in the hands of government. From the environment to foreign affairs, citizens are speaking out, often organized through civic associations and non-government organizations.
For NGOs, "the 1995 Kobe earthquake is the watershed," says Chris Sigur, head of the Japan Society of Northern California. "The government mechanism for dealing with that kind of disaster proved to be totally inadequate," with NGOs filling the void, says Sigur, whose New Japan Initiative explores signs of change in Japan that are often missed.
The rock star of the Japanese NGO world is Onishi Kensuke, a round-faced, unassuming 36-year old who started his career as a humanitarian relief worker delivering aid to widows in the Kurdish regions of Northern Iraq more than a decade ago.
In 1996, Onishi founded Peace Winds, with a staff of three, to do disaster and humanitarian relief work. In the first two years, he accepted no salary. The group worked first in Mongolia and then spread to strife-torn lands such as Kosovo, Sierra Leone, East Timor and back to Iraq. Today it has an annual budget of $4 million and 65 paid staff members.
Onishi emerged as a celebrity during the Afghanistan war. Peace Winds rushed in after the ouster of the Taliban. But when the Japanese government convened a global conference on aid to Afghanistan in January 2002, Onishi was barred. A ruling party politician and Foreign Ministry bureaucrats were angered by his insistence that aid would be more effective if channeled through NGOs.
Peace Winds
The outcry led to the sacking of senior officials and the disgrace of the politician. It spurred an outburst of enthusiasm from young Japanese who now shun careers in big corporations to join Peace Winds and other NGOs.
Indo Seiko, a 26-year-old Peace Winds staffer, also credits her experience at the University of Wisconsin watching fellow students agitate over sweatshop labor and AIDS. "They weren't waiting for the administration to change the rules," Indo says. "They made their own rules."
Onishi himself got involved in Iraq while studying in Britain. "This generation is globalized," he told me recently in a conversation at his Tokyo headquarters. "Four small islands are too small for us."
Older Japanese have a vision of the world that only extends as far as the Malacca Straits, Onishi says with disdain. "They say Iraq is too far away. Africa is another world."
Some of that sentiment surfaced when three young Japanese, two of them involved in NGO work, were recently kidnapped in Iraq. Many Japanese felt they had put themselves in harm's way and caused trouble for the government.
But Onishi dismisses that talk. If anything, he sees the dispatch of a contingent of Japanese troops to do humanitarian assistance in Iraq as a mistake -- it is work NGOs can do better and cheaper. His group remains in Iraq assisting public health.
The NGO movement has gained wider acceptance. Recent legal changes make it easier for NGOs to form and raise funds. The Foreign Ministry now sends officials to work with Peace Winds. Foreign aid is being channeled through NGOs in greater amounts. Japanese business is chipping in and public donations are soaring.
X Daniel Sneider is a columnist for San Jose Mercury News. Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune Information Services.