Abstract
By 1994 it had become anachronistic to think of Japan’s system of ministries and elite bureaucrats as contributing to the political and economic vitality of the nation.2 The bureaucracy is held responsible by some for increasingly rancorous trade conflicts with the United States.3 With the LDP’s loss of power in the summer of 1993, the intransigence of the bureaucracy on matters of policy, particularly on the issue of tax reform, has often left politicians looking inept and too willing to surrender the privileges and responsibilities of leadership to bureaucrats.4
A note on usage: this chapter is concerned with Japan’s system of higher civil servants. The term bureaucrat is used to refer exclusively to this group. In addition the use of the term bureaucracy is limited to Japan’s centralised system of ministries.
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Notes
Ohmae Kenichi, Heisei kanryo-ron (Heisei era bureaucracy), Tokyo, Shogakkan, 1994.
The two most frequently cited works in this regard have been: Chalmers Johnson, MITI and the Japanese Miracle: The Growth of Industrial Policy, 1925–1975, Stanford, Stanford University Press, 1982;
Daniel I. Okimoto, Between MITI and the Market: Japanese Industrial Policy for High Technology, Stanford, Stanford University Press, 1989.
Woodrow Wilson, ‘The Study of Administration’, Political Science Quarterly, Vol. 56, No. 4, December 1941, pp. 481–506. Reprinted from The Academy of Political Science, 1887.
Chalmers A.Johnson, ‘MITI, MPT, and the Telecom Wars’, in Johnson, Tyson and Zysman(eds), Politics and Productivity, Stanford, 1989, p. 187. MITI is the Ministry of International Trade and Industry and MPT is the Ministry of Posts and Telecommunications.
Hata Ikuhiko, Kanryo no kenkyu: fumetsu no pawa, 1868–1983 (Research on bureaucracy: the immortality of power, 1868–1983), Tokyo, Kodansha, 1983.
Bernard S. Silberman, ‘The Bureaucratic Role in Japan, 1900–1945: The Bureaucrat as Politician’, in Silberman and Harootunian(eds), Japan in Crisis: Essays on Taisho Democracy, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1974, p. 183.
Peter Duus, Party Rivalry and Political Change in Taisho Japan, Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 1968.
T.J. Pempel, ‘The Tar Baby Target: “Reform” of the Japanese Bureaucracy’, in Ward and Sakamoto (eds), Democratising Japan: The Allied Occupation, Honolulu, University of Hawaii Press, 1987, p. 179.
Akagi Tsuruki, Kansei no keisai (The formation of bureaucratic structure), Tokyo, Nihon Hyoronsha, 1991.
Hans H. Baerwald. The Purge of Japanese Leaders under the Occupation. Berkeley, University of California Press, 1959.
There are many advocates of this view among both Japanese and American scholars. but perhaps the most prolific on the subject has been Muramatsu Michio. For a good summary of his views, see‘Bringing Politics Back into Japan’, Daedalus, Vol. 119, No. 3, Summer 1990, pp. 141–54.
Sogo Kenkyu Kaihatsu Kiko, Jiten 1990 nendai Nihon no kadai (An encyclopedia of issues for Japan in the 1990s), Tokyo, Sanseido, 1987, p. 581.
The JSP now likes to be known as the Social Democratic Party (SDP). One of the most famous cases of an ex-bureaucrat in an opposition party is that of Wada Hiroo. Wada was known as a left-leaning bureaucrat in the Agriculture-Forestry Ministry during the war and went on to play a prominent role in the Japan Socialist Party from the time he joined in 1949. See Otake Hideo, ‘Reannament Controversies and Cultural Conflicts in Japan: The Case of the Conservatives and the Socialists’, in Kataoka Tetsuya (ed.), Creating Single-Party Democracy: Japan’s Postwar Political System, Stanford, Hoover Institution Press, 1992, pp. 68–78.
See Ezra N. Suleiman, ‘Bureaucracy and Politics in France’, in Suleiman (ed.), Bureaucrats and Policy Making: A Comparative Overview, New York, Holmes and Meier, 1984, pp. 123–4.
Gerald L. Curtis, The Japanese Way of Politics, New York, Columbia University Press, 1988, pp. 91–4.
Hata Ikuhiko, Senzenki Nihon kanryosei no seido • soshiki • jiji (Japan’s Pre-war Bureaucracy: system, organisation, and personnel), Tokyo, Daigaku Shuppankai, 1981, p. 167.
Uchiyama Hideo, Nihon no seiji kankvo (Japan’s Political Environment), Tokyo, Sanrei Shobo, 1988, p. 176.
Namiki Nobuyoshi, Tsusansho no shuen (The demise of MITI), Tokyo, Daiyamondo Sha, 1989, pp. 234–5.
Watanabe Osamu, Kindai Nihon no shihai kozo bunseki (An analysis of the structure of control in contemporary Japan), Tokyo, Kadensha, 1988. pp. 198–9. Watanabe views the creation of NIRA as the model for Nakasone’s approach to administration reform. That is, reform proposals based on the participation of powerful business and bureaucratic interests.
Alexander L. George, ‘The Case for Multiple Advocacy in Making Foreign Policy’, American Political Science Review, Vol. 66, 1972, pp. 751–85.
John C. Campbell, ‘Policy Conflict and Its Resolution within the Governmental System’, in Krauss, Rholen and Steinhoff (eds), Conflict in Japan, Honolulu, University of Hawaii, 1984, p. 307.
Tahara Soichiro, Shin • Nihon no kanryo, Tokyo, Bunshun Bunko, 1988, pp. 12–36. The Prime Minister’s Office was reduced in size to create the Management and Coordination Agency. This was an attempt to give the prime ministership an organisational means to exert political control over the bureaucracy. By all accounts it created little more than a paper tiger and was a failed attempt. Whatever initial promise it showed was closely tied to the informal powers of its first director-general, Gotoda Masaharu. This will be taken up in a later chapter, as an example of weak attempts at institution building; bureaucratic politics can work to limit political leadership and change in Japan while also insuring the status quo distribution of power between ministries in Japan.
Quoted by Tahara Soichiro, Nihon no kanryo 1980, Tokyo, Bungei Shunju, 1980, p. 10.
Karel van Wolferen, The Enigma of Japanese Power, London, Macmillan, 1989, p. 32.
Ozawa Ichiro, viewed as a politician who very much wants to lead the nation and to tame the bureaucracy, is disappointing when it comes to concrete measures for reforming the bureaucracy. And where he does make concrete proposals, they are protective of bureaucratic interests. This is particularly true where the Ministry of Finance is concerned, since Ozawa rejects the idea that responsibility for budgeting should be removed from the ministry and placed under the prime minister’s office. Ozawa Ichiro, A Blueprint for Reform in Japan, Tokyo, Kodansha, 1994.
The sources of bureaucratic privilege and power are varied and complex. The institutional side of the ledger would include lightly bounded systems of authority, as expressed through practices such as administrative guidance, and the maintenance of an extensive system of licence and approval functions that gives them a prominent role in the economy. Japan’s Fair Trade Commission estimates that nearly 40 per cent of the total value-added in the Japanese economy is subject to regulation by the bureaucracy. On the self-interest side of the ledger, though elite bureaucrats earn considerably less than their counterparts in finance and industry, the practice of amakudari (literally, descent from heaven), where these individuals retire from their ministries at the age of 60 or earlier to take lucrative advisory or executive posts in the private sector, is an important deferred incentive. Ministries also maintain an extensive network of public corporations that absorb large numbers of retiring bureaucratic elites into executive posts. Many of these posts are temporary, some running no more than one year, include large ‘retirement’ payments when these individuals move on to their next post-retirement position. See Chalmers Johnson, Japan’s Public Policy Companies, Washington, DC, American Enterprise Institute, 1978;
Murobushi Tetsuro, Kokyu Kanryo: riken ni saita aku no hana (Elite bureaucrats: the blossoming of an evil flower of vested rights), Tokyo, 1983;
E.B. Keehn, ‘Managing Interests in the Japanese Bureaucracy: Informality and Discretion’, Asian Survey, Vol. 30, No. 11, November 1990, pp. 1021–37.
Oliver Goldsmith, The Vicar of Wakefreld, London and Glasgow, 1766.
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Keehn, E.B. (1997). Organised Dependence: Politicians and Bureaucrats in Japan. In: Clesse, A., Inoguchi, T., Keehn, E.B., Stockwin, J.A.A. (eds) The Vitality of Japan. St Antony’s Series. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-25489-7_6
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