Civil service of Japan
[citation needed] 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.
[3] 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.
Administrative vice ministers and their subordinates are career civil servants whose appointments are determined in accordance with an internally established principle of seniority.
In the 2000s, Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi reduced the power of “tribal politicians” who spoke for special interests such as farmers, and brought in policy advisers to circumvent the civil service.
[4] Successive reforms also restricted the practice of amakudari (Japanese: 天下り), the “descent from heaven”, where retiring bureaucrats were sent to lucrative jobs at the public body they used to oversee.
[4] Finally, in 2014, Prime Minister Abe Shinzo again reduced bureaucratic autonomy by centralizing the appointment of all senior civil servants in the Cabinet Office.
[4] Certain commentators have linked the reduction of the civil service's autonomy to recent scandals, including allegations of sexual harassment,[6] falsified documents, obvious lies to parliament and misplaced military records.
[1] The Japanese had been exposed to bureaucratic institutions at least by the early seventh century A.D. (Nara period), when the imperial court adopted the laws and government structure of Tang China.
[3] However, the distinctive Chinese (Confucian) institution of civil service examinations never took root, and the imported system was never successfully imposed on the country at large.
[3] Although the United States occupation dismantled both the military and zaibatsu establishments, it did little, outside of abolishing the prewar Home Ministry, to challenge the power of the bureaucracy.
[3] Finally, the perceived threat of the Soviet Union in the late 1940s created a community of interests for the occupiers and for conservative, social order-conscious administrators.
[3] 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".
[3] 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.
[3] 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.
[3] Ministry of International Trade and Industry (MITI) frequently encountered obstacles in its early post-occupation plans to reconsolidate the economy.
"[3] 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.
[3] 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 Monetary and fiscal policy).
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.
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.
Internationally minded political and bureaucratic elites have found their market-opening reforms, designed to placate United States demands, repeatedly sabotaged by other interests, especially agriculture.
Criticism to civil services from media and the public has got stronger against some scandals, such as the practice of amakudari to assure the advantages of high-rank officials after retirement, salary standard and many other factors.
The major concern was Japan Post, with government backing, stymieing competition and giving politicians access to postal savings to fund pet projects.
DPJ set up the policy of “leadership by politics”, criticized the initiative of bureaucracy in the era of LDP, and planned to reform civil service.
In 2014, Prime Minister Abe Shinzo again reduced bureaucratic autonomy by centralizing the appointment of all senior civil servants in the Cabinet Office.
