Introduction

Abstract

In 2003 the author published Special Corporations and the Bureaucracy: Why Japan Can’t Reform.² The book concerns the public corporations that were established by Japan’s national ministries in the 1950s and 1960s to aid in the restoration of Japan’s war-devastated economy. It was the first book in English that focused on these organizations as the vehicles during Japan’s post-war years that have served to perpetuate a rigid and ingrown system of government administration of the political economy, which can no longer accommodate the pressures of a rapidly changing social political economy.³ Indeed, Special Corporations are at the heart of government administration because they effectively are extensions of the national ministries. Furthermore, the corporations, along with their subsidiaries, have come to serve as the route which ministry officials can use to migrate to upper-management positions in private industry after their retirement from their agencies.

Elite officials may have lost the ability to run an advanced industrial economy, but they continue to be masters of creating a façade of change. Perhaps no regime in the world history has been as accomplished in the use of diversionary tactics to deflect pressure for a fundamental realignment of power.

(Mikuni and Murphy, 2002)¹