The hammier the act, the better it gets. Nippon Ham, Japan's largest ham and sausage processor, tries to tap the government's post-BSE meat buyback program by pretending it has a lot of unsold domestic beef on hand, which actually turns out to be imported stock.
Undignified enough for a company of its size and established presence. But the fiasco deepens when subsequent revelations uncover that secretiveness and rigidly hierarchical family ties seem to have been at the bottom of the conspiracy.
Indeed there is something positively Gothic about the father-son relationship that has emerged between Nippon Ham founder Yoshinori Okoso, who was finally persuaded to resign as chairman of the company, and his son Hiroji Okoso, who stepped down from the presidency. The tearful Okoso junior would perform well as the hapless hero in a 15th century tragedy, torn between social justice and filial duties, with the latter having an instinctively greater pull on his well-trained heart strings.