Tokyo, June 23: Japan's bureaucracy, long criticised for its paper-pushing ways and lack of transparency, is now wired, and more and more people are flocking to the Internet to get its financial data.

The release of the the Bank of Japan's quarterly survey of business sentiment, or "tankan", in April heralded the emergence of the Internet as a fast and reliable way for the financial community to access information.

"We received 4,000 hits on our tankan page," the official in charge of the central bank's homepage Kazuo Yao said.

This was on the morning of the release alone.

"Last November, when we did this for the first time, we received 1,300 hits," he said.

The next tankan survey will be released on Wednesday morning at 8.50 AM. (2350 GMT Tuesday) and the central bank expects even more hits this time.Government agencies have started to take advantage of the growth of the Internet in Japan, launching pages filled with financial information in English and Japanese.

The tankan, a fundamental focus for the markets, is now released on the Internet at the same time as it is released to news organisations, although it still takes a few seconds longer to appear on-line than on the screens of financial news services.The Bank of Japan's homepage address is (http://www.boj.go.jp).

Tokyo's financial community is starting to take advantage of the growth of the Internet in Japan.

"I use the internet to gather news, especially during the weekend when I'm away from my desk," said Naohiko Nakajima, a foreign exchange manager at the Bank of America in Tokyo.

Japan's ministry of finance and ministry of international trade and industry also have pages that include full text reports of key data, such as trade and industrial production.

The BOJ, however, is the only financial authority in Japan that releases information real time and says its release of the tankan data is drawing more people to its homepage.

"As you know, we usually distribute paper copies, and during the April tankan release we had 100 people come to pick up copies. Before we used the Internet, we had 700 people on average," Yao said.

Compared with the US Federal Reserve and Treasury Department homepages, there is still a lot of catching up to do in Japan.Both the Fed and the Treasury Department publish minute details of their activities on their homepages."I go to the Federal Reserve Board's page," Nakajima said. "They publish the minutes from their open market committee meetings."In Japan, however, the release of the BOJ's policy board minutes is hinged on the larger debate over central bank disclosure.

"The one thing we hear about the most is the policy-making board's minutes," Yao said. "If that information becomes available, we will, of course, release it on the Internet."The advantage of direct Internet releases is in the detail they can provide. The entire text of the tankan survey, for example, is available on-line at the time of its release.

However, some who use the BOJ's homepage may not have the time to browse through all of it and some economists say the Japanese government's homepages may not necessarily be the best source of information."What I fear is that once the government agencies realise they can actually sell or spin the information on the web, they will make it easy to use, and it'll also mean the government's spin on the data, as opposed to, say, a private analyst's spin on the data," an economist at Merrill Lynch Ron Bevacqua said.

Copyright © 1997 Indian Express Newspapers (Bombay) Ltd.