Mystery donor gives Japanese city $3.6M in gold bars to fix water system
bbc.com117 points by tartoran 10 hours ago
117 points by tartoran 10 hours ago
It is an outrageously cool thing to give money for an infrastructure project. They must have some faith that the government can deliver on something with $3.5 million.
That would be two public toilets in SF, one toilet of which actually cost $300k in paperwork and so on despite two local businessmen signing up to have the work done.
Plot twist: the donation is from the owner of the company doing the infra project with the intention to launder money.
Japan, a culture so public-spirited that even the local Yakuza decide to contribute to the plumbing.
There's a pattern where criminal organizations fill governance gaps rather than starting as genuine governments. The Yakuza did this opportunistically at certain historical moments. Hamas is a similar example (not a criminal organisation, but..) , allthough they are more of a institution-building than the Yakuza ever was.
Mafias generally fill the same functions of the government but for the underworld: providing "protection", extracting "taxes", enforcing rules via the use of violence, and so on.
Probably the best example of this are American mafias.
Yes, it’s a big reason why they have always tended to be based out of immigrant communities - those were excluded from mainstream culture, governance, etc.
If you were mainstream you didn’t need the mafia - you were already the gov’t, the police, etc.
I do not understand the downvotes.
It is a rational response to bureaucratic excesses worldwide in public procurement.
It is a plea to more common sense, to more down to earth thinking and decisive action in the public sphere.
This is not a call to ignore processes. But it is a call for civil servants to respect that they are exactly that. In service, and their ambition should be to do it well and efficiently.
The downvotes are an expression of those that think civil servants should be protected from such sentiment.
You went from not understanding them to knowing exactly what they were an expression of pretty quickly!
Here is some of what happened during COVID, according to Patrick McKenzie (patio11) [1] :
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I want to both be polite about the fact and be honest about it. We, the United States of America, through our elected representatives and through civil servants who represent our interests, committed monstrous crimes in 2021, which are against the laws, traditions, and constitution of the United States of America, including aggressively redlining the provision of life-saving medical care in a way which was designed to cause racially discriminatory outcomes with the provision of medical care.
Just throwing that out there as a statement. With that caveat, one of the things that we spent tens of millions of dollars on was that we want your consultancy to write a website which will enforce residency restrictions. A residency restriction is essentially, when we are under a supply constraint, there must be some method to decide which people get it, and some people don’t. We have, in our infinite wisdom as the government, decided that equity, equity, equity is one primary thing that we are focusing on. A thing that we think would be contrary to equity is allowing anyone who shows up at the clinic to receive the life-saving medication.
The thing that we are specifically worried about is relatively well-resourced people from advantaged demographics will use their superior access to transportation and information to travel to clinics which have the vaccine available and take that instead of that vaccine being used by someone in the local community who we intend the vaccine to go to. Therefore, to get an appointment to go to the vaccine, you will need to go to the county’s website, which is delivered by Accenture or similar, and prove to the website that you reside within one of the zip codes that we have allocated for those vaccine doses. Only then will you get the ticket, virtual or otherwise, which allows you to go to the pharmacy and get the vaccine. We spent tens of millions of dollars on that, targeting essentially a four-month window where we were acutely supply constrained. But we did not turn off residency restrictions on the websites after that four month window because we physically had no way to do that because that was not in the bid documents in some cases. ...
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Just one of the many ways that rigid institutions that behave more like stupid robots than things capable of dynamic decision-making cause immense harm. This is not a rant against equity btw, only against insanity.
[1] https://alethios.substack.com/p/patrick-mckenzie-vaccinateca
This is real and there's no way to get these problems down to zero. However I do believe that the best first step is to make sure the government has more employees and fewer contractors. It will cost more year to year but the delivery will be much closer to what the constituents want and over time I would expect it to save money as well. With that said it's not a silver bullet as that group of people needs to be properly motivated, they still will need specialist help from consultancies, and there may be institutional capture anyway.
weird how contributing to your community is "outrageously cool".
How times have changed
They likely wouldn’t even accept the money because it’s in gold bars, and they wouldn’t be able to prove its source.
Of course they have faith - the donor is likely the prime contractor, doing a bit of casual circular accounting while doing a charitable donation tax writedown - or just some plain old fashioned laundry.
It’s hard to see another reason for the format of the donation.
The lone ranger donor route feels severely suboptimal, unless perhaps if the donor is a .001%er pledging a large share of their net worth.
Imagine if this anonymous person worked with a foundation pledging to match $3.5M if said amount was raise via crowdfund. Even if say $1M goes to the campaign and NGO bloat, that’s still way more pipe money.
The lone ranger may have actually done something optimal but indirect. There is a lot of press that went global pointing out real problems. Japanese are proud people, this might actually help direct public funds to solve the problems.
> Imagine if this anonymous person worked with a foundation pledging to match $3.5M if said amount was raise via crowdfund.
Idk man. Thing is where i live we are already crowdfunding to maintain our pipes. It is called local taxes and water utility bills. So if anyone were to ask me for more money for the same task i’m already paying not insubstantial sums for I would be very cross with them. It is just not a good look.
Now i don’t know about Japan. Maybe they don’t pay taxes and utility bills. Somehow doubt it, but who knows.
"would put it to good use - including tackling the deterioration of water pipes"
There is your faith in action. Zero concrete promise, no accountability.
* In the culture that also produced this comment. This is not a universal problem, just a societies unable to produce a high trust environment problem.
More than 20% of Japan's water pipes have passed their legal service life of 40 years, according to local media
That is rather low. The US still has some wooden(!) water pipes in use, as well as other plumbing installed in the late 19th/early 20th century.
This is the reason that installing a 2-mile bus lane on Van Ness Avenue in San Francisco took several years. They took advantage of the opportunity to replace the hollowed out logs that had served as one of the city’s most critical water mains since the 1906 quake.
going straight from mycotoxins to microplastics without going through lead speedrun
You owe me a coffee, cheers for the fountain of liquid out my nose. How much for a water feature?
And people will still say 'Just painting a bus lane for a few miles cost $20MM!!! Uggah duggah' :-/
Urban trees in Montreal (and presumably other cities) only survive through the summer because of the water they get from leaky pipes.
> Maple trees drink about 50 litres of water every day, and it seems some of their hydration is coming from Montreal’s crumbling infrastructure.
https://www.ctvnews.ca/montreal/article/montreals-leaky-pipe...
I just realised I've never actually thought about how urban trees get water. I never see them get watered and I assume that would be an incredibly inefficient way to do it.
For some relevancy, this issue is still on Japanese minds because last year, corroded pipes led to one of the largest sinkholes the country has ever seen, swallowing a truck and drowning the driver in a pit of shit and piss. It took months to recover his body.
Many plumbing companies have since spoken up about how they’ve been requested to fix this infrastructural issue but without the appropriate funds because “how expensive can replacing some pipes be?” And “who cares about leaky pipes under the streets? The water just goes back into the ground.”
https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2026/02/20/japan/pipe-corr...
Is that why the American tourists in Europe always ask if tap water is drinkable?
Meanwhile, in Europe: https://romanempiretimes.com/aqua-virgo-a-2000-year-roman-aq...
When the sections are stored above ground, they can make for some really gnarly skate parks. You've heard of the half-pipe, now see the attempts at full-pipe!
And that's Osaka. Osaka's population peaked around 2017.[1] The only major city in Japan not on a downtrend is Yokohama, which is in the Greater Tokyo area.
Keeping up all the infrastructure as the population declines is tough. That's one of the challenges of this century for the developed world.
Why is it difficult? I assume the proportion of infrastructure experts would stay the same.
Because you now have more infrastructure than people to pay for and maintain it. As population density decreases, the people that remain are using oversized infrastructure. The relationship between required maintenance and amount of usage is far from linear. For a lot of infrastructure being underused means additional maintenance procedures become necessary.
A way to combat this is to move people and condense the population again, abandoning areas in the process and pretty much writing them off. Not optimal, but it'll help.
I realize there's near zero probability, but the mention of mysterious Japanese gold made my mind immediately go to this:
My mind went to the founder of Bitcoin.
The actual founder of Bitcoin cannot touch their money without causing a lot of panic in the market. I believe Coinbase's 2021 S-1 prospectus explicitly listed "the identification of Satoshi Nakamoto... or the transfer of Satoshi’s Bitcoins" as a business risk factor.
I would expect Satoshi to make a lot of money on later wallets that are not identified as theirs.
Not sure why the NSA would pay for a Japanese water system.
$3.6m given to an outsourcing contractor whose cousin is on the council, would get you a couple of miles of pipe in the UK, by the time you have paid off all the consultants
> Osaka recorded more than 90 cases of water pipe leaks under its roads in the 2024 fiscal year, according to the city's waterworks bureau.
I must admit, that seems pretty small given how many roads and many people said infrastructure supports.
Still a good idea to get ahead of maintenance, but I am pretty impressed.
I wonder if Japan is suffering the same issue many western countries are facing, where regulation and wages are becoming too high to get much done with that amount of money. In my country, I would be surprised if you could replace a single roads water pipes for 3.6million.
Satoshi, is that you?
Even the Yakuza are sick of shitty infrastructure.
That is a bad idea. Hydrocarbon polymers like PEX, ferrous alloys, and concrete would be much more practical.
I think people are missing the joke, but gold sewer pipes is amusing to consider.
In fairness, after hundreds of years of people trying to turn lead into gold, this might be one of the more practical attempts.
45lbs of gold would get you a ten foot-ish 1 in ID plumbing pipe.
... and we already have a problem with copper theft.
The city has 3m people according to the article. Even if only 10% are tax payers... all they need is a little over $10 per tax payer to equal the donation.
I mean the donation is cool. And will hopefully get the residents thinking about how they can also help their city. But I can't help thinking how it's just a small band-aid on a city that can't manage it's infrastructure budget as needed.
Wow! Thats wild, I thought Osaka was on par with Tokyo? It certainly feels so. Im very confused. Im just returning from a 1.8 million city in China, thats considered a village.
I mean, the mitsubishi logo, makes it pretty obvious who the donor is.
Edit: i mean, we can't possibly figure out who donated, thank you kind donor.
Mitsubishi Group has a lot of companies, including a bank, so no the logo doesn't say anything about who donated it.
Doesn’t that just mean that they’ve been manufactured by Mitsubishi Materials Corporation?
And I imagine they could trivially track them, like most modern gold bars sold/collected in this volume.
There is no mystery, the donor just donated the money anonymously.
All that means is that the city won't publish the name of the donor. It doesn't mean "no one knows who has paid for this".
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25 gold bars ..20 gold bars
100 yens we received
would be un any other country, but not japan