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

THE GOVERNMENT OF MODERN JAPAN:
THE JAPANESE BUREAUCRACY
Calls for Reform

Bureaucracy Video Clip

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Gerald L. Curtis :: Cabinet ministers serve on the average for about eight months in Japan. So there is a revolving door of cabinet ministers, while everybody else who works supposedly for the cabinet minister is a professional career bureaucrat.

And so that has led to a lot of complaint in Japan that the politicians really don’t control the bureaucracy, because the minister isn’t in his position long enough to figure out what’s really going on about the policies or to control the personnel appointments and other things, and those who have the power are not politicians but career bureaucrats.

So this situation has led to a lot of calls for administrative reform in Japan that would shift more power away from the bureaucrats and to the politicians.

One of the problems that Japan faces in having such a reform is that it doesn’t involve simply having more political appointees hold important bureaucratic positions. It involves the fact that the politicians have no staffs of their own to help them think through policy, so that even if politicians were appointed to important positions in the bureaucracy, unless they can bring people who are loyal to them in as their secretaries and staff supporters, they are simply dependent on the professional bureaucrats for all their information and expertise and for policy anyway. So this is a very complicated problem for the Japanese to try to resolve.