The same official did manage to bring in a team of experts from the Smithsonian to give advice on modern museum management. To put most of that advice into practice he will have to wait – as enlightened middle-level bureaucrats and executives across Japan are waiting – for stodgy seniors to retire, or for their department to fall into such disarray that they can finally seize the initiative. This group of would-be reformers are like Madame Defarge in Dickens's A Tale of Two Cities, a secret revolutionary who sat for years in her tavern quietly knitting the names of hated aristocrats into her shawl. When the revolution finally came, she took her place at the foot of the guillotine, counting as the heads rolled. A lot of people in Japan are waiting to count heads.
You can hear the drumbeat of coming revolution in the rising level of anger in public opinion, fueled to a great extent by the sheer embarrassment of falling behind. There is considerable chagrin as the gaps between Japan and the United States, Europe, and newly wealthy Asian states widen. The thrust of the educational system is to make people highly competitive, and the hierarchical social structure gets people into the habit of ranking ethnic groups and nations as «higher» and «lower.» Naturally, they would like to stand at the top of the pyramid, and this leads to obsessive comparisons between Japan and other countries. This is where the frustration comes in.
When millions of Japanese travel abroad and return from Singapore's beautiful and efficient Changi Airport to the grim environment of Narita, the disparity is too strong to ignore. The decline of the Tokyo stock market, against a backdrop of explosive growth in New York and London, has been an agonizing spectacle for Japan's financial community. By the end of the century, Chinese-directed films featuring major Hollywood stars regularly took top spots in American box offices, and Chinese stars had become household names; in contrast, Japan's greatest success was Pokemon, a movie for ten-year-olds. The Japanese sense the contrast between the bright lights and excitement outside, and the mediocrity inside. They are embarrassed.
Yet while the groundwork exists, there is no assurance that the revolution will come. Against the dissatisfaction felt by the public is arrayed a complex system of bureaucratic control, infinitely more subtle than anything ever achieved in Russia or China in their Communist heydays. In order to visualize what is involved, let's do a «thought experiment» and ask ourselves what it would take to dismantle just a few bricks of the bureaucratic edifice – the system of licenses for aerobics instructors, for instance. The mind's screen goes blank, because the scenario whereby the Japan Gymnastics Association, the Central Association for Prevention of Labor Disabilities, and the Japan Health and Sports Federation will voluntarily disband and give up their lucrative permit businesses is simply unimaginable. What, then, can be done about the tens of thousands of other agencies and special government corporations – all working in secrecy and against whose fiat there is no recourse?
The public may be able to combat the bureaucracy over certain high-profile projects such as the Pont des Arts, or well-publicized scandals such as dioxin contamination. But power lies in the details, in the thousands of tiny Pont des Arts-type monuments rising quietly in every city and hamlet, in the myriad unreported dump sites not covered by the media, and deep in the impenetrable thicket of regulations in the form of unwritten «guidance» hemming in the life of the nation.
For those who hope that Japan is headed in the direction of greater freedom, it is sobering to see how brand-new industries create cartels in the old pattern. The Internet? Providers established the Japan Network Information Center (JPNIC) as the entity that approves new domain addresses. The JPNIC set to work right away, putting up the same barriers to outsiders and upstart businesses that we find in older cartels. For example, the JPNIC does not approve addresses unless they use Japanese Internet providers-despite global guidelines worldwide that say local authorities shall show «no preferential treatment for customers of a particular data network.» It's the old game of using a cartel to keep the foreigners out. Meanwhile, the JPNIC raised registration fees to the point where it costs four times more to list a new domain than it does in the United States. The result of battening down the windows to the Internet- the very room that everyone thought was going to bring fresh air into Japanese industry – is that by 1998 Japan had only 0.3 percent the number of domains in the United States, and ranked twenty-first in the world for domain names per capita. Multiply this cozy cartel by a million, and you'll get a sense of the complexity and power of the system. Seeking to reform the gigantic structure of the bureaucracy is a project overwhelming in its scale, involving nothing less than a radical change in social mores; the entire country would be turned upside down and inside out. That is exactly what Japan's leaders dread: they fear that if they make too many changes the whole jerry-built edifice of bureaucratic management will collapse and the nation will sink into anarchy. This anxiety acts as a powerful brake against change. For the moment, Madame Defarge faces a very long wait.
There has been much talk in recent years of Kaikaku, «reform,» and while the bureaucracy has made a few timid steps toward reform, especially in finance and trade, Kaikaku is hampered by one major flaw: it aims, by and large, to shore up the status quo. Bureaucrats find ways, in classic Dogs and Demons fashion, to make small, nonessential changes, rather than tackle serious structural problems both in the industries they control and in their own systems of management. The phrase Kisei Kanwa, used for «deregulation,» is highly symbolic, for it means «relaxation of the rules.» It does not imply a discarding of the rules.
Here's how it works. Gas prices in Japan average 2.7 times world levels due to a law forbidding direct import. After 1996, deregulation allowed JAL, the national airline, to buy fuel abroad – but JAL cannot use this gas on domestic routes, and sulfur- and lead-content standards are designed to exclude South Korean gas. Contractors, pressured by the cartels they belong to, will not unload shipments bought through newly opened channels. Even after deregulation, foreign gas still cannot enter Japan directly.
In 1997, Japan finally legalized transplants from brain-dead patients. The «legalization» involved so many compromises and restraints that two years later only one liver transplant and one heart transplant had taken place. Although the law has changed, dozens of desperately ill patients continue to raise money to travel abroad for organ transplants, as they have been doing for decades. For all intents and purposes, such transplants remain illegal in Japan.
In response to strong public discontent, the government set gyosei kaikaku, «administrative reform,» as a priority for most of the 1990s, but the real work in dismantling the top-heavy edifice of Japanese officialdom lags. Instead, in a titanic demonstration of tatemae conquering honne, much of the effort has gone into renaming the ministries. As of January 2001, several ministries have changed their names (and some have disappeared, subsumed into larger entities). For example, the Construction and Transport ministries are being combined with the National Land and Hokkaido Development agencies into a Land, Infrastructure, and Transport Ministry. At tremendous expense, these new ministries will shuffle personnel and departments between them, setting up new signs and offices to indicate their new functions-and then will go on to do business more or less as before. Halfhearted reforms such as this are endemic, and highly deceptive, if taken at face value. As for the investigations and scandals in government ministries, once public anger dies away, it's back to business as usual. «Reform» of this nature would be called «stagnation» in any other country.