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Japan The Civil Service
In trying to discover "who's in charge here," many
analysts
have pointed to the elite bureaucracy as the people who
really
govern Japan, although they composed only a tiny fraction
of the
country's more than 1 million national government
employees.
Several hundred of the elite are employed at each national
ministry
or agency. Although entry into the elite through open
examinations
does not require a college degree, the majority of its
members are
alumni of Japan's most prestigious universities. The
University of
Tokyo Law Faculty is the single most important source of
elite
bureaucrats. After graduation from college and,
increasingly, some
graduate-level study, applicants take a series of
extremely
difficult higher civil service examinations: in 1988, for
example,
28,833 took the tests, but only 1,814, or 6.3 percent,
were
successful. Of those who were successful, only 721 were
actually
hired. Like the scholar-officials of imperial China,
successful
candidates were hardy survivors of a grueling education
and testing
process that necessarily began in early childhood and
demanded
total concentration. The typical young bureaucrat, who is
in most
cases male, is an intelligent, hardworking, and dedicated
individual. Some bureaucrats lack imagination and,
perhaps,
compassion for people whose way of life is different from
their
own.
The public's attitude toward the elite is ambivalent.
The elite
enjoy tremendous social prestige, but members are also
resented.
They live in a realm that is at least partly public yet
far removed
from the lives of ordinary people. Compared with
politicians, they
are generally viewed as honest. Involvement of top
officials in
scandals such as the Recruit affair, however, had, to some
extent,
tarnished their image.
Japan's elite bureaucrats are insulated from direct
political
pressure because there are very few political appointments
in the
civil service. Cabinet ministers are usually career
politicians,
but they are moved in and out of their posts quite
frequently (with
an average tenure of under a year), and usually have
little
opportunity to develop a power base within a ministry or
force
their civil service subordinates to adopt reforms. Below
the
cabinet minister is the administrative vice minister.
Administrative vice ministers and their subordinates are
career
civil servants whose appointments are determined in
accordance with
an internally established principle of seniority.
In a 1975 article, political scientist Chalmers Johnson
quotes
a retired vice minister of the Ministry of International
Trade and
Industry (MITI) who said that the Diet was merely "an
extension of
the bureaucracy." The official claimed that "the
bureaucracy drafts
all the laws.... All the legislature does is to use its
powers of
investigation, which for about half the year keeps most of
the
senior officials cooped up in the Diet."
In the years since this official made his proud boast,
however,
it became apparent that there were limits to the
bureaucrats'
power. The most important was the LDP's growing role in
policy
formation. Political scientist B.C. Koh suggested that in
many
cases members of the LDP policy-oriented tribes
(zoku) had
greater expertise in their fields than elite bureaucrats.
Before
the latter drafted legislation, they had to consult and
follow the
initiatives of the party's Policy Research Council. Many
analysts
consider the role of the bureaucracy in drafting
legislation to be
no greater than that of its counterparts in France,
Germany, and
other countries. Also, the decision of many retired
bureaucrats to
run as LDP candidates for the Diet might not reflect, as
had been
previously assumed, the power of the officials but rather
the
impatience of ambitious men who wanted to locate
themselves,
politically, "where the action is."
An intense rivalry among the ministries came into play
whenever
major policy decisions were formulated. Elite civil
servants were
recruited by and spent their entire careers in a single
ministry.
As a result, they developed a strong sectional solidarity
and
zealously defended their turf. Nonbureaucratic actors--the
politicians and interest groups--could use this rivalry to
their
own advantage.
The Ministry of Finance is generally considered the
most
powerful and prestigious of the ministries. Its top
officials are
regarded as the cream of the elite. Although it was
relatively
unsuccessful in the 1970s when the deficit rose, the
ministry was
very successful in the 1980s in constraining government
spending
and raising taxes, including a twelve-year battle to get a
consumption tax passed. The huge national debt in the
early 1990s,
however, may be evidence that this budget-minded body had
been
unsuccessful in the previous decade in curbing demands for
popular
policies such as health insurance, rice price supports,
and the
unprofitable nationwide network of the privatized Japan
Railways
Group. MITI frequently encountered obstacles in its early
postoccupation plans to reconsolidate the economy. It has
not
always been successful in imposing its will on private
interests,
politicians, or other ministries. According to law
professor John
Owen Haley, writing in the late 1980s, MITI's practice of
gyosei
shido, or administrative guidance, often described as
evidence
of the bureaucracy's hidden power, was in fact a
second-best
alternative to "express statutory authority that would
have
legitimated its exercise of authority." Administrative
reform
policies in the 1980s imposed ceilings on civil service
staff and
spending that probably contributed to a deterioration of
morale and
working conditions.
Still another factor limiting bureaucratic power was
the
emergence of an affluent society. In the early postwar
period, the
scarcity of capital made it possible for the Ministry of
Finance
and MITI to exert considerable influence over the economy
through
control of the banking system
(see The Financial System
, ch. 4). To
a decreasing extent, this scarcity remained until the
1980s because
most major companies had high debt-equity ratios and
depended on
the banks for infusions of capital. Their huge profits and
increasing reliance on securities markets in the late
1980s,
however, meant that the Ministry of Finance had less
influence. The
wealth, technical sophistication, and new confidence of
the
companies also made it difficult for MITI to exercise
administrative guidance. The ministry could not restrain
aggressive
and often politically controversial purchases by Japanese
corporate
investors in the United States, such as Mitsubishi
Estate's October
1989 purchase of Rockefeller Center in New York City,
which, along
with the Sony Corporation's acquisition of Columbia
Pictures
several weeks earlier, heated up trade friction between
the two
countries.
The whole issue of trade friction and foreign pressure
tended
to politicize the bureaucracy and promote unprecedented
divisiveness in the late 1980s and early 1990s. During the
Structural Impediments Initiative talks held by Japan and
the
United States in early 1990, basic changes in Japan's
economy were
discussed: reforms of the distribution and pricing
systems,
improvement of the infrastructure, and elimination of
official
procedures that limited foreign participation in the
economy
(see Trade and Investment Relations
, ch. 5). Although foreign
pressure
of this sort is resented by many Japanese as an intrusion
on
national sovereignty, it also provides an opportunity for
certain
ministries to make gains at the expense of others. There
is hardly
a bureaucratic jurisdiction in the economic sphere that is
not in
some sense affected.
Repeatedly, internationally minded political and
bureaucratic
elites found their market-opening reforms, designed to
placate
United States demands, sabotaged by other interests,
especially
agriculture. Such reactions intensified United States
pressure,
which in turn created a sense of crisis and a siege
mentality
within Japan. The "internationalization" of Japan's
society in
other ways also divided the bureaucratic elite. MITI, the
Ministry
of Labor, and the Ministry of Justice had divergent views
on how to
respond to the influx of unskilled, usually South Asian
and
Southeast Asian, laborers into the labor-starved Japanese
economy.
An estimated 300,000 to 400,000 of them worked illegally
for small
Japanese firms in the late 1980s. Ministry of Education,
Science,
and Culture revision of guidelines on the writing of
history
textbooks, ostensibly a domestic matter, aroused the
indignation of
Japan's Asian neighbors because the changes tended to
soften
accounts of wartime atrocities.
Data as of January 1994
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