Postal Nightmare

Usually I talk about what's happening my life here and how it relates somehow to Japan, but today I thought I'd talk about the issues in the Japanese post office at the moment.

As many of you would figure, the Japanese post office functions in much the same way as the American post office, basically delivering the mail, sorting out packages, shipping, that sort of thing. Other, more, governmental administration functions, such as passports for example, are done by the local government offices, also called ward offices, which exist in each ward or city area. I live in Minato-ward, so I get my gaijin registration sorted out there.

Unlike America, the Japanese post office also offers savings accounts and life insurance. Current estimates place the total combined amount stored by these services to be over $3 trillion, making the Japanese post office the largest deposit taking entity in the world, and it’s life insurance division the largest in Japan.

Yet, after the burst of the bubble economy in the late 80s/early 90s, the Japanese parliament, called the Diet, and it's most recently Prime Minister, Junichiro Koizumi, have been looking for ways to offload a large number of government sponsored programs to the private sector. The most notable being the privatization of the national railway company JR, which was privatized in the late 80s and has been operated in this fashion since, with little or no governmental interference.

The current crisis comes from the proposed privatization of the post office, yet another effort by Koizumi to reduce governmental size and to help settle the large number of bad loans that helped to collapse the bubble and continue to hold Japan down economically. While both Koizumi's cabinet and the lower house of the Diet voted for the sale, the Upper House, yesterday, voted against the sale. The main reason being a very interesting one, and somewhat distant from what seems to be happening in the states recently, the people.

With about 25,000 branches national, the Japanese post office is the primary account form of course for a high number of people living in the rural areas. The Upper House fear that their constituencies will turn on them if they approve this bill. The people's general fear being that if the post office is privatized and the savings division is split off into a separate company, as proposed, then the new company will start lending money as a bank would and create problems. Japanese faith in their own banks is rather low due to the bad loan situation and repeated government bail-outs. To add to the problem, many postal employees fear job cut backs due to restructuring under the proposal. The Japanese post office employees over 400,000 employees.

At the moment Koizumi believes wholeheartedly in the privatization scheme and has now dissolved the Lower House and called an election for September, perhaps for a run through on the bill again. We'll all have to wait and see what happens.

Wisdom of the Day: Work for the Japanese Post Office? Maybe it’s time to quit your day job