For Japan, the results of such a policy are now coming in, and they indicate that, far from being all-knowing, Japan's bureaucracy no longer has a clear understanding of the activities under its control. What we see is officialdom that is confused, lazy, and behind the times, leading to incredible blunders in the management of everything from nuclear plants to drug regimens and pension funds. Until a decade ago, very few people noticed that there was anything going wrong in Japan; rather, the emphasis was on Japan's «efficiency.» It is now becoming possible to see what happens to a nation that develops without the critical ingredient of reliable information.
Much money and millions of words have been spent on the question of whether Japan will catch up with the West in new information industries. But few have even noticed that Japan has a fundamental problem with information itself: it's often lacking and, when it does exist, is fuzzy at its best, bogus at its worst. In this respect, Japan's traditional culture stands squarely at odds with modernity – and the problem will persist. The issue of hidden or falsified information strikes at such deeply rooted social attitudes that the nation may never entirely come to grips with it. Because of this, one may confidently predict that in the coming decades Japan will continue to have trouble digesting new ideas from abroad – and will find it more and more difficult to manage its own increasingly baroque and byzantine internal systems. The nation is in for one long, ongoing stomachache.
For the time being, bureaucrats and foreign academics alike are tiptoeing around embarrassing situations, «as one who steps on dog dung in the dark.» This is comfortable for those in charge, since it relieves them of any urgency to solve Japan's pressing problems. Defaulted bank loans, unemployment, rising national debt, lost plutonium, out-of-date analog television, waste dumps in the countryside, tilting schoolyards, ugly beachfronts, global warming, defective cars, poisonous milk – Japan has them firmly under control. There is just one little problem with this approach. Abraham Lincoln pointed it out once to a delegation that came to the White House urging him to do something he felt wasn't feasible. He asked the members of the delegation, «How many legs will a sheep have if you call the tail a leg?» They answered, «Five.» "You are mistaken," Lincoln said, «for calling a tail a leg don't make it so.»
5. Bureaucracy
Therefore a wise prince must devise ways by which his citizens are always and in all circumstances dependent on him and on his authority; and then they will always be faithful to him.
– Mаchiavelli, The Prince (1513)
Japan's bureaucracy has been much studied, mostly with admiration, by Western analysts, who marvel at its extremely subtle means of control, its tentacles reaching downward into industry and upward into politics. And there is no question that Japan's bureaucracy can lay claim to being the world's most sophisticated-several rungs up the evolutionary ladder from the weak, constrained officialdom in most other countries. Bureaucrats in the United States or Europe are hedged in by politics, local activism, and above all by laws that mandate freedom of information as well as punish their receipt of favors from businesses under their control. In Communist countries, such as China, bureaucrats may be corrupt, but in the end the Party rules, and officials can see their most elaborate schemes overturned m a minute by the stroke of a Politburo member's pen.
Not so in Japan. A largely ritualistic form of democracy in force since World War II has given the bureaucracy far-reaching control over society. Ministries not only are shielded from foreign pressures but function outside Japan's own political system. Schools teach children not to speak out; hence activists are rare. The police investigate only the most flagrant cases of corruption and courts rarely punish it; cozy under-the-table give-and-take between officials and industries has become institutionalized. It is no exaggeration to say that government officials control nearly every aspect of life from stock prices to tomatoes in supermarkets and the contents of schoolbooks. From this point of view, too, Japan is a test case: what happens to a country that chooses an extreme form of bureaucratic rule?
The bureaucracy's techniques of control have a strong bearing on what is happening to Japan's rivers, cities, schoolyards, and economy, especially because of the amakudari, "descended from heaven," the retired bureaucrats who work in the industries that ministries control. MOF men become bank directors, Construction Ministry men join construction firms, ex-policemen staff the organizations that manage pachinko parlors, and so forth. The pickings are fat: a retiring high-level amakudari bureaucrat can earn an annual official salary of ¥20 million plus an unofficial ¥30 million in "office expenses" and, after six years, a retirement of ¥20 million, which adds up to about ¥320 million in six years!
The ministries meet any efforts to restrict amakudari with vigorous resistance. «It's because we are assured of a second career that we are willing to work for years at salaries below those in the private sector,» says an official at the Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry, and Fisheries. The result is an incestuous system where businesses hire and pay ex-bureaucrats, and in exchange receive favors from government ministries.
While amakudari in private industry have garnered most media attention, there is another, even more influential type-amakudari who run the vast web of semi-government agencies through which subsidy money trickles downward. The largest and most powerful of these are the tokushu hojin, «special government corporations,» almost half of whose directors are amakudari. After these directors retire from tokushu hojin, they descend another rung, becoming directors of a second group of agencies, koeki hojin, or «public corporations.» These agencies function with hardly any public scrutiny, and they are protected by ministry colleagues who look forward to enjoying amakudari benefits when their own time comes.
Consider the Japan Automobile Federation (JAF). Theoretically, JAF exists to provide road service for Japan's drivers. However, JAF spends only 10 percent of its annual ¥48 billion budget on road service, paying much of the rest to amakudari officials from the Transport and Police ministries who draw double incomes from JAF and its shell subsidiaries. Where the lion's share of JAF's money goes nobody knows for sure, and this is typical of the secret jugglings and cooked books of the tokushu hojin.
Tokushu hojin are the very keystone of Japan's bureaucratic state, and they represent yet another economic addiction. Although there has been much talk of reducing or abolishing their largely anachronistic activities, they and their subsidiaries employ 580,000 people; if you count the families and dependents, they support more than 2 million people. The government can no more afford to suddenly cut back on tokushu hojin than it can afford to reduce the construction budget, since such a large percentage of the workforce depends on income from these agencies.