Top METI official takes flak for business trip parties in Texas in 2017

Nothing to be alarmed about. Nothing unusual here. Nothing wrong with spending 2.5 million yen over four nights to hold parties in a foreign country. All normal business practice according to Abe and cronies.

And people wonder why companies like Dentsu get pork barrel contracts and officials like Maeda have cushy positions waiting for them when they rotate out of government. Your tax dollars at work.

This is why the US is still the greatest superpower on Earth. Every corrupt imbecile in the world floods and parks their money in the US. All the wealth in the world flows in and out through the US.

If Japan's economy ever collapses, thanks to Abe and LDP cronies, then they surely flee to the US under the protection of Koch bros and Wall Streets fellows. Their American overlords will laud these patriotic Japanese bureaucrats for destroying the Japanese economy enough for American and foreign investors swarming to buy everything for cheap and ruin Japanese lives for shareholder capitalism. At the same time, patriotic Japanese bureaucrats gain American citizenship and transfer their wealth to the US. The American financiers are happy even more as they gain new customers who gain ill-gotten wealth from corruption.

It is becoming the norm reading corruption articles daiky here on JT.

What will it really take to wake the masses from the deep slumber.

If you are an organization promoting start-up companies (METI is), then SXSW is the place to be, and parties are where connections are made. It is crazy expensive to do that at SXSW. onsider also that $23,400 is not a lot of money for, say, a nice booth for a week at a big trade show. Now, we could surely question whether a METI official would be able to work SXSW effectively, but I would not automatically label this as corruption or gross incompetence. Who was there? What results were obtained? Were records kept? If, say, representatives from 20 Japanese start-ups attended and were able to meet VCs, that's not too bad. If it was only Maeda-san and a few friends, that would be bad.