For more than a decade, Japan's financial authorities have been trying to treat the growing mountain of bad loans at Japan's banks as a "kuroko" of the Japan economy.
In kabuki, a "kuroko" stagehand dressed in black from head to toe, who isn't supposed to been seen, comes on stage to change props in the middle of a play. In the same fashion, the banks dressed up their nonperforming loans so they also would not been seen.
Even after Japan teetered on the brink of a financial collapse in 1997-98, officials such as Eisuke Sakakibara, vice international finance minister, insisted that the bad loan problem "had passed its peak" -- the same phrase that Yasushi Mieno, governor of the Bank of Japan, used in 1994 to adjust the black robes on the kuroko of financial stage props. Most recently, Prime Minister Yoshiro Mori flew all the way to Davos, Switzerland, to tell the World Economic Forum that Japanese banks and corporations are now completing the cleanup of their balance sheets and would be flying high within a year or so.