They are highly educated, mostly male and almost always wear grey suits, and now they are in the cross-hairs of the man who hopes to become Japan’s next prime minister: government bureaucrats.
People the world over may love to hate civil servants, often accusing them of slowing down business and everyday life with a thicket of red tape, unnecessary rules and incomprehensible jargon.
But Japan’s state bureaucrats, all 360,000 of them, are a slightly different species — they may just be too good at what they do. Critics charge that it is they, not politicians, who have been running the country.
For too long, says Japan’s opposition leader Yukio Hatoyama, the mandarins have quietly steered the ship of state and asked the elected lawmakers to rubber-stamp their decisions.
Hatoyama wants to clip their wings, a goal that is a key plank of his campaign platform ahead of the Aug. 30 election which, polls have indicated, may well make him Japan’s next prime minister.
The election, Hatoyama has said, will be a “revolutionary vote to create a new Japan with politician-led politics.”
“In contrast with the bureaucrat-led politics ... we will produce politics in which the public plays a leading role,” he said.
Political observers have long said Japan’s officials wield far greater power than their counterparts in other democracies when it comes to steering policy, drawing up laws and carving up state budgets.
The heads of ministries, who carry the rank of vice minister, are often seen as more powerful than the politicians whom they ostensibly serve.
When the top bureaucrats retire, they tend to parachute into cushy jobs in the companies and agencies they formerly supervised.
Hatoyama has also vowed to put an end to that practice — dubbed amakudari or “descent from heaven” — which has been blamed for breeding conflicts of interest, collusion and bid-rigging.
The special status of Japan’s government servants dates to the seventh century when Japan introduced a bureaucracy modeled on ancient China’s merit-based mandarin system.
Japan’s best and brightest became bureaucrats, who commanded respect, even awe, as they directly served the emperor.
After Japan’s defeat in World War II, when the political elite was removed from power, the bureaucrats were credited with guiding the nation on its path from post-war gloom through its economic miracle.
The officials did so by working hand in hand with the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), which has ruled almost without break since 1955, and with big business — a cozy relationship often dubbed the “iron triangle.”
The feats of Japan’s bureaucrats are still revered and a popular TV drama celebrates the heroic efforts of 1960s-era trade ministry officials.
Critics charge that, in the process, the bureaucracy became an unstoppable force that, with very little accountability to the public, turned Japan into one of the world’s most heavily regulated societies.
Author Alex Kerr argued in his book Dogs and Demons that ministries, bent on spending funds to maintain their annual budgets, have pursued wasteful “pave-and-build” policies that have devastated Japan’s countryside.
Bureaucrats have also drawn fire when graft, waste or mismanagement have been exposed, such as the loss of tens of thousands of state pension records.
The LDP’s reformist former prime minister Junichiro Koizumi stared down a stronghold of the bureaucracy when he launched the break-up of the massive postal system, a behemoth with large banking and insurance arms.
Now Hatoyama wants to rein in the officials to a far greater extent, promising to deploy 100 lawmakers to supervise ministries and, crucially, wrest back control of the budget process from the finance ministry.
He has pledged to set up a national strategy office under the prime minister’s direct control which would compile the budget, draft diplomatic statements and author other key government policies.
Hatoyama’s proposed sweep of the officialdom is timely, say some experts.
“The bureaucracy worked well when Japan was trying to catch up with other countries,” said Fusao Ushiro, a politics professor at Nagoya University. “But since Japan has already achieved that goal, there is greater urgency for creative thinking, which is not common or encouraged among bureaucrats. The era of the bureaucrats may be coming to an end.”
Some experts though warn that Japan’s civil servants may die hard, and could even stall the Democratic Party of Japan’s reformist plans.
“No matter who governs the country, they will need bureaucrats,” said Tetsuro Kato, politics professor at Tokyo’s Hitotsubashi University. “The question is how effectively Japan can make use of the elite group.”
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