Without a doubt, 2007 will go down as an "annus horribilis" for many industries in Japan, particularly the food industry. The list of scandals and crises last year was long indeed, and began right in January with the discovery that crowd-pleasing confectioner Fujiya had been mislabeling products for years.

That the iconic brand was capable of such deception was a shock — even to a public that is fairly used to coverups and other malfeasance. Fujiya since has come under the protective wing of former rival Yamazaki, but other companies guilty of similar crimes have fared less well.

In June, ironically named Meat Hope Inc. of Hokkaido was found to have been falsely labeling its goods when packages marked as beef were found to contain meat from pork and chicken as well.

Meat Hope's executives clearly were unprepared to handle the media furor from the revelations and actually tried to lie their way out of the situation. Four of its officers are now behind bars and the company is bankrupt.

As the year went on, other companies were found to have committed the same crime: Confectioners Ishiya of Hokkaido, Akafaku of Mie Prefecture, and Osaka restaurant Senba Kitcho were found guilty of passing off goods as fresh even though they had actually passed their expiry dates — sometimes by several weeks.

It could be argued that after the Fujiya scandal, the public was much more attuned to the potential for such crimes and thus the number of reported incidents jumped as a result of this sensitivity.

But the scandals — and their heavy consequences — were not limited to the food industry.

Mitsubishi Motors' systematic, long-term coverup of fatal vehicle defects finally ended in suspended prison terms for two former senior officials in December 2007, and former MMC President Katsuhiko Kawasoe will face the ruling on his negligence case Wednesday.

Earlier, the Aneha affair over falsified construction blueprints ended in prison time for architect Hidetsugu Aneha, tainting yet another industry.

Even the government itself was not immune to public relations damage. Its disastrous handling of the pension fiasco and the misuse of public funds at the agriculture ministry helped bring down Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, who resigned in September.

Such public scandals however, are by no means restricted to Japan. Even Germany — often praised for its high level of corporate governance — had a fair amount of business scandals in 2007. The energy industry, for example, was rocked by the Vattenfall case, in which the Swedish-managed energy company was found to have misled the German public about a series of mishaps and accidents at two nuclear plants.

The president of German operations, Klaus Rauscher, was forced to step down, along with other executives who were directly involved.

In other industries, Siemens and Volkswagen saw themselves embroiled in painfully embarrassing corruption cases. Although they never constituted a public safety hazard, both firms revealed the truth at a snail's pace, consequently harming their reputations by angering the public again and again with new revelations.

Regardless of the industry, country or case at hand, the common thread through these various scandals contains two elements: First, excessively slow disclosure; second, an insufficient mix of immediate countermeasures.

In Japan, another peculiarity of the media system — the press clubs — increases the risks for any company that gets entangled in a corporate scandal. Coverage of scandals is basically monopolized by the reporters authorized to enter the press clubs of the ministry overseeing the concerned industry. For example, the press clubs at the Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries or Health, Labor and Welfare ministries cover the food companies, and the Land, Infrastructure and Transport Ministry handles the automakers, such as Mitsubishi Motors.

Most of the reporters manning these press clubs all come from news agencies' social affairs bureaus and usually lack industry-specific knowhow. They monitor any scandal with painstaking attention to detail and focus on punishing the wrongdoers rather than moving on to a thorough analysis of the underlying problems and suggesting solutions.

Hence any delay in coming clean and implementing countermeasures will be exploited by the media here more than anywhere else.

Of course, this also comes with opportunities. The Japan Times recently reported on the fate of Ishiya, which lied about the freshness of its goods. Since the scandal broke, the firm has moved swiftly to replace management, introduce new measures, and most importantly, communicate these changes via the media to the public. The result is that the company is selling more of its famed Shiroi Koibito cookies now than ever before.

Likewise Citibank gained from making quick and bold moves after a scandal over false statements back in 2004 put them under public fire. Not only did then CEO Chuck Prince come to Tokyo and bow, but the banking group also fired several managers and voluntarily shut down part of its business here. Fast-forward to 2007, when Citibank announced it was taking over Japan's scandal-tainted brokerage Nikko Cordial, a step that would have been unthinkable without the successful reputation-rebuilding steps it took before.

It is a consistently disappointing truth of business that foreign and Japanese companies alike tend to make the same mistakes over and over, regardless of the numerous cases studies available throughout history. That no business is immune to crisis is a lesson all companies should take from the goings-on of 2007 to ensure that they prosper in 2008 and beyond.

Jochen Legewie is president of German communications consultancy CNC Japan K.K.