Those two favorite targets for Western moralizing about Japanese corporate corruption — Olympus (cameras) and Recruit (information) — are back in the headlines. Both typify the shallowness of much Western reporting in Japan.

Olympus is a first-rate Japanese company credited with saving millions of lives with its advanced endoscope (internal camera) technology. But like many other Japanese firms in the late 1980s it got caught up in Tokyo's response to Washington demands that Japan inflate its economy to ease massive U.S. trade deficits.

Zaitech — literally financial skill — was the slogan of the day. It called for companies to diversify away from their main business lines and begin trading in land and securities. The result was the bubble economy, followed by the collapse of asset prices in the early 1990s. Companies like Olympus, caught up in the real estate fever of the time, had to decide what to do next.