THE GOVERNMENT OF MODERN JAPAN: THE JAPANESE BUREAUCRACY Origins of Bureaucrats' Social Prestige |
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Gerald L. Curtis :: A tradition in which the bureaucrat in Japan is regarded as being of high social prestige, and to be drawn from among the best and the brightest, and in which a bureaucratic career is seen as being a highly prestigious career, is not something that began after the Second World War with the democratic reforms that were imposed by the American occupation. Quite to the contrary, this system has very deep roots in Japanese history, and probably a tradition, a Confucian tradition, that came initially from China. In Japan’s modern period, beginning with the Meiji Restoration in 1868, the state needed to create a way to have the capacity to rapidly mobilize the population for rapid economic growth and to ward of the dangers of Western imperialism that were already affecting neighboring countries, particularly China. So that in the early 1870s, Japan began to develop the bureaucracy that became so powerful in the following years. |
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