PROSPERIO

- La PROcesa Sitemo Perkomptera de Enmedie Rilata Informaro de Osaka -

The immorality and corruption of the politicians and bureaucrats of the central government is reported by the mass media almost every day and it perturbs the Japanese society. This is never the recent phenomena. In fact this must be a long-term tradition of this land that never experienced democracy. However, the social situation with the economic recession after the bubble economy and with the corruption of the national leaders exactly looks like that of those days when the young militaristic nationalists uprose in arms and soon rushed into the World War Ⅱ.The corruption of this kind in politics and administration is also happening in the completely same structure in the local governments. What is the cause? I suppose that a self-control function is missing in the system that holds these politicians or administrators in addition to the immorality of them. The politicians buy votes and the bureaucrats offer bribes from the enterprises by the abuse of their authority. No one can accuse it. Even prosecutors do not know what to do, probably because of incomplete law or insufficient information. What guarantees this structure is found in their secretiveness. That is the secretiveness that they want to keep in group so that they can preserve their own privileges. They have a meeting in a closed room and secretly put not only votes or money, but future status into their pocket. The money spent here is all the tax collected from the citizen. Those who can control them must be the citizen as tax-payers, however, the mass media do not inform the citizen about what is happening. Or, mass media themselves cannot get the information unless there is some whistle-blowing. To tell the truth, they keep their power by not letting the people know.Even in Japan, which is often referred to be a country without democracy, it is often said that there is no democracy, the grass-roots movements have also occurred one after another, chiefly concerning the environmental problems, for the last several years and recently the people demand to open the information of the governments. This tendency will be accelerated more by the influence from the US, the most advanced country for information, where the government has opened information to the public. Or the pressure from the foreign countries might give, as usual, the strongest effect to this tendency. In fact, Japanese government recently was forced to make an international promise to open its environmental information and to give its public projects over the budget of $200,000 to the international market by means of abolishing the custom of back-room negotiation in Japan and making public in English documents. This gave a headache to the government workers all over Japan, however, only this kind of outer pressure, unfortunately though, could solve the problems of Japanese, where the governments, enjoying their easy life in a closed system for a long time, can neither recover self-purification ability nor find the way out of the problems.

The wave of information disclosure also directly hit me, who had been enjoying a comfortable doze at a local government for a long time. I am in charge of a computer system, in which we first collect the data on the polluting sources and the pollution level in the environment, and then calculate the conditions to abate the pollution down to a permissible level. For this system I have developed the methods to proceed the paperwork in the office made lots of the processing programs. As this kind of information were seldom shown to the citizen, my work was, to tell the truth, was rather easy and did not require the procedures for it. However, during the last few years, I have been very busy in developing a new computer system that has the main purpose of giving the information to the public.

That information disclosure system will be made public in February next year. The contents of the environmental information will be much more detailed than other systems. The system will be shown for the time being, only at the Osaka Municipal Center of Learning Environment ("Iki-Iki Chikyu-kan") in the former Flora Exposition site, Tsurumi Ward. However, the same information will also be on the Internet after getting through the paperwork. By the way, the title of this essay is the name of our computer system. Although English names are often given to this kind of system, we put an Esperanto name, with some unnatural parts in its abbreviation though.