Raw Japan
Slices of Japanese business, politics and life
Date therapy for Japan bureaucrats
If there is one thing you can be sure of when it comes to Japanese bureaucrats, it is that they work long hours. When parliament is in session, they’re handling urgent questions or requests from lawmakers all the time, and I’ve heard some say they hardly remember seeing the sun when parliament is sitting.
But new Finance Minister Naoto Kan has come up with a plan to review the work styles of sleep-deprived bureaucrats, saying he wants to make it possible for finance ministry staff to go on dates on weeknights.
Government ministries have tried before to get bureaucrats to go home sooner. Wednesdays are “leave the office on time” day for all ministries and an announcement encourages everyone to get out at 6:15 P.M. At the finance ministry, senior officials are encouraged to tell younger team members to leave early if it’s not busy.
Some say such efforts have helped them shorten their work hours a bit, but the ideal of an eight-hour working day is still a long way off. As one bureaucrat put it: “In the end, we just have too much to do.”
How exactly Kan plans to get the bureaucrats to go on dates is still unclear, though. In good bureaucratic fashion, he is setting up a team to come up with the details of the plan.
But whether he can fundamentally change the bureaucratic lifestyle is anyone’s guess.
Unknown territory for bureaucrats and media
Japan’s new prime minister, Yukio Hatoyama, whose Democratic Party scored a historic victory in last month’s election, wants to radically change how the country is run and in particular reduce bureaucrats’ control over formulating policy.
And his government has taken a symbolic approach – it has decided to ban top bureaucrats from holding news conferences to explain its policy stance. The Hatoyama government has also abolished twice-weekly meetings of top bureaucrats, which have discussed, coordinated and decided policy agendas before cabinet meetings so that cabinet ministers can rubber stamp them. Naoto Kan, the new deputy prime minister, has dubbed the so-called vice ministers’ meetings “the bid-rigging meetings” of bureaucrats.
I covered Japan’s Finance Ministry for nearly 10 years and I now cover other departments such as the Foreign Ministry. Each ministry is different, but usually vice ministers hold press conferences Mondays and Thursdays to clarify the ministry’s stance on the development of policy-making as well as technical and historical background. In addition, there are many different types of press briefings by ministry officials of various ranks. Those are all in addition to regular news conferences by cabinet ministers every Tuesday and Friday. Yes, there are a lot of press opportunities here – maybe too many.
Still, as soon as the Hatoyama government decided to allow only lawmakers — namely cabinet ministers and their deputies – to hold news conferences on policy ideas, reporters started to ask lots of “what if” questions.
“What if we want details on a disaster or the spread of the new H1N1 flu immediately when there is a new development?”, “What if ministers are not available right away or not fully aware enough of technical issues to be able to answer reporters’ questions, as has been the case in the past?”
Similar questions dominated the first news conference by Chief Cabinet Secretary Hirofumi Hirano, Japan’s top government spokesman, just hours after the government was formed on Wednesday. Even a few days later, Hatoyama, Hirano and other cabinet ministers were still being repeatedly asked to clarify their stance on media access. The widely circulated Yomiuri newspaper on Friday questioned the government’s approach in its editorial ”Muzzling bureaucrats might be step too far“, saying restricting press conferences would make the policy-making process less transparent.
What you mean is, the big boys in the press are nervous that their monopoly on access may be over, and then, yikes, anyone could do the job. If Our Man were the editor of the Yomiuri, he’d be nervous too, lol, as the internet kids say, lol.
Historic win in Japan. Now what?
Historic is usually a word that makes my skin crawl when I see it in the news. Journalists are prone to overuse it, so when I saw it in our election stories I had to stop myself deleting it — because this election truly is historic.
The Liberal Democratic Party had never lost an election since its founding in 1955. Even when it lost power for a few months in 1993/94, it was because of LDP lawmakers defecting rather than an election loss.
So the Democratic Party, under prime minister-elect Yukio Hatoyama, has a huge mandate. What will he do with it?
It’s clear that the last two elections were votes for a change to the old system where the ruling LDP, big business and bureaucrats ruled the place. Remember the 2005 LDP landslide was led by Junichiro Koizumi running on the destruction of his own party’s pork-barrel history.
The question is whether voters also rejected deregulation in the wake of the financial crisis and slumping exports that put large numbers of unprotected contract workers out of work.
The Yomiuri newspaper, Japan’s biggest seller, certainly subscribed to that view in its editorial on Monday. Along with the undisputed argument that voters were disgusted with the LDP’s failures, it said the defeat “was brought about by the collapse of its structural reforms that went too far”.
