Asian Topics on Asia for Educators || The Government of Modern Japan: The Japanese Bureaucracy

THE GOVERNMENT OF MODERN JAPAN:
THE JAPANESE BUREAUCRACY
Stability and Power

Bureaucracy Video Clip

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Gerald L. Curtis :: One important feature of the Japanese bureaucracy, which is quite different from the situation in most other democratic countries and especially different from the situation in the United States, is that everybody who works in a Japanese ministry — except for the minister himself — is a bureaucrat who has come up through the ranks of that ministry. In other words, there are no political appointments, no political appointees in the Japanese bureaucracy.

In the United States, when a new president is elected, it is said that there are some 8,000 positions in the bureaucracy that change hands because the new president appoints politically — makes political appointments to these positions — so it’s not simply the secretary of a department, or the assistant secretaries or the under-secretaries, but it goes down several levels in the American system where our political appointees occupy positions within the bureaucracy.

The Japanese career bureaucrats have a huge amount of power both because they control all the positions of importance within their own ministries, other than the minister himself who circulates rather often, and because they draft virtually all the legislation that the cabinet submits to the Diet, and that is the majority of the legislation that the Diet considers.