IN BRITAIN, after the Daily Telegraph broke the story last year that members of parliament had blatantly fiddled expenses, all the media had a field day. In Japan details are leaking out of a large secret fund kept in a black box near the prime minister's office that for decades has been used to curry political favours, including, it is said, among journalists and television commentators. Tellingly, the Japanese media is reacting to the scandal like the three wise monkeys of Nikko: see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil.

The existence of the slush fund has long been known to insiders. But details of its size and the way it was spent were unknown to the public until Hiromu Nonaka, a former chief cabinet secretary, revealed last month that from 1998-99 he spent up to ¥70m ($600,000 at the exchange rate of the time) a month from his secret little piggy bank. That included ¥10m to the prime minister, ¥10m to politicians in the then-ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), and more scattered among political commentators and opposition-party members, including those going on trips to North Korea.

Mr Nonaka, who is 84, says he made the confession because he did not want to carry the secret to the grave about what he rightly refers to as taxpayers' money. But he may also have been making mischief for the Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ), which drove the LDP from power last year. It has since come to light that the new government of Yukio Hatoyama, elected on a platform of transparency and accountability, has been dipping into the cabinet office's slush fund as freely as its LDP predecessors.

On May 14th Hirofumi Hirano, Mr Hatoyama's chief cabinet secretary, confirmed, in answer to a largely unreported parliamentary question by the Japanese Communist Party, that he had withdrawn ¥360m ($3.8m) from the fund between September and March, and spent all but ¥16m. He claimed to have returned the unused portion to the exchequer. But, he also said, for the time being he did not intend to disclose what the money was spent on, nor did he expect to stop using the pot.

Mr Hirano also appeared reluctant to investigate the outgoing LDP administration led by Taro Aso, which raided the fund last year just before it handed over power to Mr Hatoyama. Two days after the election, and two weeks before leaving office, it withdrew an impressive ¥250m.

Some people might shrug off the fund as part of the old Japanese tradition of gift-giving, admittedly involving some pretty generous presents. Mr Hirano says money is necessary to gather information “for the benefit of the nation”. But for a government that has long promised to dig up the “buried treasure” hidden in government accounts in order to improve shaky public finances, it is extraordinary that it, too, is taking such brazen advantage of this darkest of slush funds. Just as extraordinary, not to mention suspicious, is the impressive silence from most of the powerful mass media. More evidence, if it were needed, of its central role in Japan's longstanding political dysfunction.