Yakuza helps in disaster while other aid is caught in red tape

I read on CNN and Time last night that aid is not reaching the victims of the disaster quickly because the famous (or infamous) Japanese bureaucracy has delayed, if not outright forbidden, aid from being shipped and/or airlifted to the affected areas.

Here's a link to the story on Yahoo:

us.m.yahoo.com...

"One major bottleneck has been Japan's fondness for red tape. "In special times, you have to do things in a special way," says Kensuke Kobayashi, an IBM employee in Tokyo who has tried to organize relief efforts to Tohoku from the Japanese capital. "But in Japan, there is a legal wall that stops everything." Japanese shipping company NYK offered to provide a container ship for helicopters to land on when ferrying in relief supplies to coastal areas, but the government rejected the offer because the NYK shipmates lacked the proper licenses to help with such work. After some wrangling, volunteer foreign doctors were told that because they didn't have Japanese medical licenses, they could conduct only the "minimum necessary medical procedures" in the disaster zone."

It's ridiculous.

In the same article you find that organized crime once again is coming to aid the victims, just like they did in the Kobe quake. They do this because in a quote from the article: "Indeed, one of the first organizations to start relief convoys in the northeast was none other than the yakuza, Japan's famous gangsters. Unconstrained by reams of regulations, the underworld representatives, whose business tentacles extend to the trucking business, simply started delivering aid on their own, without government approval."

To read more about the situation and the Yakuza:

news.yahoo.com...

What does that say about government when the SHTF?

Hahaha, wow....

Even the gangsters are doing a better job then there government.

I was wondering when this was gonna happen. They did this during the Kobe earthquake too. It's their way of "sticking it to the man".

“There are no yakuza or katagi (ordinary citizens) or gaijin (foreigners) in Japan right now. We are all Japanese. We all need to help each other.”

perfectly quoted.

Bureaucracy is a intentional impediment to hasty decisions. It exists ostensibly to prevent things, like, for example, the construction of nuclear power plants of fault lines. Obviously the bureaucratic system is broken and corrupt. In addition, bureaucracies are not designed to expediting activities, only to slow them down.

Hopefully, they are circumvented as much as possible.