In the light of recent events, this might be as good a time as any to admit I once received a large cash donation in a brown-paper envelope.
I'll come back to that in a minute, but first I want to promise that this column will not mention the W*r*d C*p. Everybody else may be obsessed with a silly football tournament in France, but not this column. The subject of which today is "the economic crisis in Japan". I don't know exactly what has happened to the Japanese economy in recent times but one relevant fact, chosen randomly from an article in the Economist, is that the debtequity ratio for Japanese non-manufacturing companies is now 159 per cent. This is bad (apparently), and there's worse. According to the Economist, industrial production fell 6 per cent in the first quarter of 1998, and GDP is expected to shrink this year after two decades of continuous expansion. (Contrast this with Western economies, where only Helmut Kohl has expanded continuously for that long.) The situation seems bleak. But how different it all was 10 years ago, when I toured Japan as a guest of the foreign ministry. I think it was people from the ministry who gave me the cash in the brown envelope but I can't be sure, because I was suffering from the combined effects of jet-lag and the hospitality of JAL airline, which I think served us the national drink of every country we passed over, including Outer Mongolia, on the way to Japan. I was among a group of 25 young Europeans who had won an essay competition sponsored by the Japanese government. It was an all-expenses-paid trip, and I had heard from a previous winner that we'd be given spending money as well when we got there.
Sure enough, when we arrived we had an "orientation" meeting, the highlight of which was the handing out of brownpaper envelopes, stuffed with hundreds of thousands of yen. I can't remember how much exactly, but I know it was enough for several Happy Meals, even in Tokyo. I want to place on the record here that at no stage were any favours asked or given in return for this money. OK, our guests gave us an insight into the high-pressure Japanese education system by cramming us full of knowledge about their country throughout the tour. But luckily, since we were all jet-lagged and hung over, we couldn't concentrate on any of it, so instead we just enjoyed the sights. It took a while to get used to the bizarre Japanese time-system, under which if the schedule said "Breakfast 7 a.m.", this meant we had to have breakfast at seven o'clock in the morning. There was one day when we were scheduled for a visit to the Tokyo fish market at 5 a.m. and by then we knew that under Japanese time this meant five o'clock in the morning. I remember studying the inscrutable faces of my European colleagues and knowing, instinctively, that we would all be forgetting to set our alarm clocks. No matter. Mr Soma - our tour guide - had sensed this as well and arranged with our hotels for 4.30 a.m. wake-up calls. He thought of everything, that man. He took us to the Kabuki theatre another night where, thanks to headphones with English translation, I could appreciate how impossible it was to follow the plot. Of course, because of the extraordinary length of Kabuki productions, we saw only the second half of the play. My diary says this went on for four hours, but my memory insists it lasted about the same time as secondary school. Then again, there's such a vast gulf between the English and Japanese languages, translation is almost impossible (which I think is how I won the essay competition). We discovered this gulf another night when we went - without Mr Soma, who we'd lost by means of a tricky manoeuvre at one of the motorway intersections - to an authentic Japanese restaurant, where we tried to order anything except raw fish. The result was chaos. We tried sign-language in vain. We tried pointing at other diners' raw fish, saying "anything except that". The work of the restaurant ground to a halt as the staff struggled to understand us. A friendly Japanese businessman came over to intercede, but since he spoke not a word of any European language, he only added an element of polite bowing to the general confusion.
Finally, a Belgian who had been studying the guide book for some time made a stab at ordering in the vernacular. This was followed by smiles of relief from the staff, who returned with plates of fresh-from-the-sea tuna, untouched by any cooking method and redder than Bill Clinton's nose. How we missed Mr Soma then. It could have been worse. We could have ordered fugu, the poisonous fish highly prized by Japanese gourmets. They have the poison removed first, of course, but it's said the more serious gourmets prefer a trace of it left in - and chefs have made fatal mistakes in the past. Restaurants need a special licence to serve it.
Which brings me back to the economic crisis. I don't know how it could ever have happened with Mr Soma around to keep an eye on things. But if the Economist is to be believed, Japan's economic chefs have made a serious mistake in the fugu preparation, and the country could be about to clutch its throat and sink to the floor gasping, pulling the rest of the world after it like a table cloth (enough of the metaphor - Ed). And there's more pain on the way. Because tomorrow Japan play Argentina in the World Cup (OK, so I lied) and the likes of Ortega and Batistuta are likely to make the Japanese defence look like so much raw tuna. On the other hand, I see from this newspaper's guide to the tournament that Japan beat Iran in the qualifiers, which makes them at least the second-worst team in the tournament. Iran are unquestionably the worst, and enjoy the further distinction of being the team allocated to me in the office pool.
Which means one thing: the chances of anybody offering me a brown envelope stuffed with cash again in the near future are slight.