THE GOVERNMENT OF MODERN JAPAN: THE JAPANESE BUREAUCRACY Corruption Scandals (1990s) |
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Gerald L. Curtis :: In the 1990s, however, the Japanese bureaucracy came under a more serious attack than has ever been true in modern Japanese history for more than a hundred and twenty years, and that was because of two reasons. One was that it was discovered that corruption was not only rampant among Japanese politicians, but was rampant among Japanese bureaucrats as well. And this came as a great shock to the Japanese people. People have become accustomed to the idea that politicians, that many politicians, were corrupt, that there was a great deal of money passing hands from business to political leaders that was not legal. But the myth of the bureaucrat as being above such materialist and corrupt behavior — and as someone who was devoting his life to serve the interests of society and to serve the state — was so powerful that when evidence of wrongdoing on the part of bureaucrats was exposed by the mass media in the 1990s, it created a huge disillusionment among the Japanese public and a spate of bureaucrat-bashing that was a major feature of Japanese politics throughout this decade. One result of this exposé of scandals among the bureaucrats — of bureaucrats being entertained lavishly by businessmen at golf resorts, at fancy restaurants, even being flown in private airplanes for holidays to Hong Kong and Australia and elsewhere — one of the consequences of this was to lead to new and incessant demands for bureaucratic reform, for reducing the power of the bureaucracy. |
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