Overview

The long-awaited series of political and administrative reforms of the Japanese Government went into effect on January 6, 2001.  Most foreign as well as perhaps a majority of Japanese scientists, engineers, and observers of the country's science and technology policy have focused attention primarily on the merger of the former Monbusho (designated in English as Ministry of Education, Science, Sports and Culture) and the Science and Technology Agency (STA) to form Monbu Kagakusho (in English, the Ministry of Education, Sports, Culture, Science and Technology, or MEXT).  They have also paid some attention to the elevation of the former Council of Science and Technology to the status of Council of Science and Technology Policy within the Cabinet Office.  However, both the rationale for the merger of the former Monbusho and STA, and the creation of the new Council on Science and Technology Policy (or, more precisely the elevation to Cabinet level of the former Council on Science and Technology that was beholden to STA for staff support) need to be viewed in the context of the more sweeping changes that either went into effect on January 6, or which are scheduled to go into effect on April 1, the first day of Japanese Fiscal Year 2001. Assessments of prospects for changes in the ways that the Government of Japan operates, particularly with respect to science- and technology-related issues, also merit being viewed in this larger context. 

Background.  Former Prime Minister Ryutaro Hashimoto is generally credited with providing the impetus for the current reforms, having remarked in 1996 that a reformed, streamlined government appropriate to the 21st Century would be essential in view of the rapid changes taking place in Japan's socioeconomic system.  To this end, in June 1996 the Diet approved Hashimoto's proposal to establish a Headquarters for Administrative Reform and an Advisory Council to the headquarters consisting primarily of distinguished non-government members reporting to the Prime Minister.  The Council, which submitted its recommendations to Hashimoto in December 1997, went on to assist in drafting the implementing legislation.  It continues to function as a watchdog organization to oversee progress in its recommended reforms.

The fate of the Advisory Council's recommendations became uncertain after Hashimoto's resignation the following summer in the wake of substantial election losses by his Liberal Democratic Party (LDP).  However Prime Minister Keizo Obuchi, his successor, eventually endorsed the reform recommendations, which were legally adopted by a series of laws enacted by the Diet during 1999.

The Four “Pillars” of Reform.  A December 2000 explanatory publication issued by the Headquarters for the Administrative Reform of the Central Government of Japan explains the system in terms of four “pillars”.  Namely:

1.      Establishing a System with More Effective Political Leadership;

2.      Restructuring National Administrative Organs;

3.      Creating a More Transparent Administration; and

4.      Drastically Streamlining the Central Government.

Tadao Koike, former President of the Mainichi Newspapers, former Chairman of the Japan Newspaper Publishers and Editors Association and a member of the Advisory Council to the Headquarters for Administrative Reform, discussed the rationale for the reforms in an article in the January 2001 edition of Look Japan.  According to Koike, the first of these pillars is the most important of the four.  Indeed, the effectiveness of the remaining three will depend critically on how seriously this first pillar is taken.

Establishing a System with More Effective Political Leadership

The Japanese Cabinet System.  If the detailed provisions aimed at “establishing a system with more effective political leadership” are the most important elements of the recent government reform measures, some of their subtleties are somewhat difficult for a foreigner to understand.  The reason stems from significant distinctions between the ways the Japanese Cabinet functions compared with the functions of cabinet governments in other parliamentary systems–e.g., the UK.  Japan's postwar Constitution vests the Cabinet with collective executive authority under the leadership of the Prime Minister.  And of course the Cabinet is ultimately responsible to the elected members of the Diet.  However, over the years as the complexity of the issues facing the country has increased, the importance of the career civil service (invariably referred to in Japan as the “bureaucracy”) in decision-making has increased relative to that of the Diet.  One result has been the notorious territoriality of the country's ministries and agencies.  A closely related result has been that members of the Cabinet have come to be regarded (and often to regard themselves) as spokespersons and advocates within the Cabinet for the administrative organizations which they nominally head, rather than as members of a collective executive authority responsible for determining broader proposals for submission to the Diet on matters of cross-cutting, national importance.  For his part, the Prime Minister has often been regarded as little more than the presiding officer of a group of semi-independent ministers whose first allegiance has been to their ministries.  Indeed, there have occasionally been questions about whether the Prime Minister even has the legal authority to submit proposals on his own initiative to the Cabinet!

The laws implementing the recent reforms contain provisions intended both to strengthen the Cabinet's executive function and responsibility, and to enhance the leadership of the Prime Minister over the Cabinet.  In particular, his authority to introduce proposals for discussion by the Cabinet on his own initiative prior to possible submission to the Diet is now explicitly recognized.

The implementing laws also: (1) expand and strengthen the existing Cabinet Secretariat, (2) create a new Cabinet Office, and (3) place new, politically appointed officials near the apex of each ministry.

Cabinet Secretariat. The implementing laws state explicitly that the Cabinet Secretariat, which directly assists the Prime Minister, will be in charge of drafting and planning “basic principles on important policies of the Cabinet.”  The secretariat is headed by the Chief Cabinet Secretary, who is a member of the Cabinet and holds the rank of Minister.  This official is assisted by three newly created Deputy Chief Cabinet Secretaries and five (rather than the former two) Assistant Cabinet Secretaries.  The occupants of these posts are to be appointed by the Prime Minister, in consultation with the Cabinet.  In the event the Cabinet should resign en mass, occupants must either be reconfirmed in their positions or replaced, at the pleasure of the new Cabinet.  In order to maintain flexibility and introduce possibilities for fresh ideas, the Deputy Chief Cabinet Secretaries and Assistant Cabinet Secretaries are to be recruited not only from various ministries, but also from non-government organizations.

Cabinet Office. The newly created Cabinet Office, which is also headed by the Prime Minster, is to serve, in essence, as the administrative, coordinating, and research arm of the Cabinet Secretariat.  In order to emphasize its importance with respect to crosscutting policies, the Cabinet Office is assigned a higher status than any ministry.  In common with the Cabinet Secretariat, its personnel are to be recruited from both the ministries and the private sector.

Not only was the Prime Minister's legal authority relative to the Cabinet and the government's administrative organizations ambiguous prior to the January 6 reforms.  Additionally, he lacked any mechanism for controlling and coordinating the activities of the government he nominally heads.  The expansion and modification of the Cabinet Secretariat and the creation of the Cabinet Office are intended to provide such mechanisms.  The latter organization can be regarded as roughly equivalent to the Executive Office of the President (EoP) in the United States, an organization created in 1939 with the explicit purpose of helping the President of the United States (then Franklin Roosevelt) control his own government. 

Cabinet Office Councils. Provision has been made for the creation of special councils within the Cabinet Office to deal with important crosscutting national issues.  The Prime Minister serves as de jura chair of each council. The de facto chair of each council is a Cabinet Member who is, in essence, a minister without portfolio.  Each council consists of a several permanent members, and several from outside the government appointed for limited terms.  Four such Councils were created on January 6.  These are the Councils on: (1) Economic and Fiscal Policy, (2) Science and Technology Policy, (3) Central Disaster Management, and (4) Gender Equality.  If the Cabinet Office can be regarded as roughly equivalent to the EoP in the United States, then the Council of Science and Technology Policy is roughly parallel to the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST), while the staff of the Cabinet Office serving as its secretariat would be equivalent to OSTP.  The Minister of State for Science and Technology Serves as de jura chair of the Council of Science and Technology Policy and Science Advisor to the Prime Minister.

Permanent members of the Council for Science and Technology are Hiroo Imura, former President of Kyoto University and a long-time member of the Council of Science and Technology that preceded the new Cabinet Level Council; Shiro Iishii, Professor Emeritus at Tokyo University; and Hiroshi Kuwabara, Vice Chairman of Hitachi, Ltd.  Its four rotating members include Hideki Shirakawa, Professor Emeritus at Tsukuba University, who shared last year’s Nobel Prize in Chemistry.

State and Parliamentary Secretaries.A third and final significant institutional innovation aimed at establishing a system with more effective political leadership is to place one or more State Secretaries and one or more Parliamentary Secretaries within each ministry, each of them subordinate to the respective Minister, who is a member of the Cabinet, but out ranking the Vice-Minister, who is the senior civil servant.  In the case of the Monbu Kagakusho (Ministry of Education and Science), there are two State Secretaries and two Parliamentary Secretaries, one set perhaps to deal with matters related to education, the second with matters related to science and technology. 

In order to understand the significance of these new positions within the ministries, it is useful to recognize that although the Diet, whose elected members have responsibility both for enacting legislation, annointing the Prime Minister, approving his Cabinet, does not have staff support equivalent to that enjoyed by the US Congress.  Although Diet members have personal assistants, Diet committees lack research staffs.  Nor are there organizations equivalent to the Congressional Research Service (CRS) and General Accounting Office (GAO) in the United States.  Given these conditions, the Diet has come to rely heavily on the career civil service (or bureaucracy) to draft the legislation that it ultimately debates and enacts. 

Diet vs. Civil Service

Historical Background. This situation has come about in part because, in historical terms, the Civil Service predates the Diet.  The system of cabinet government, as well as many of the current ministries, including the Ministry of Education, were created early in the Meiji Era (1869-1912); a few, such as the Ministry of Finance, claim their lineage from agencies of the Imperial Household dating from the 8^th Century[1].  The civil service and cabinet government systems created in the Meiji Era were based on European models. In particular, the career Civil Service, modeled after the British and French systems, was conceived of as an elite, highly trained, politically neutral body of individuals dedicated to the welfare of the nation as a whole.  However, there was a critical difference between the Japanese system, adopted in the mid-19^th Century and, say, the far older British system.  Whereas the British system emerged over several centuries in parallel with the struggle of the Parliament (and particularly the House of Commons) to assert its prerogatives as representative of the public against the authority of the Crown, the Japanese system was established by decree by the Meiji Emperor.  This was done on the advice of a handful of his advisors, following the downfall of the Shoganate and the removal of the Imperial residence from Kyoto to Edo, which was renamed Tokyo.  This close group of advisors became, in essence, a cabinet, with its existence formalized with the promulgation of the Meiji Constitution in the 1880s.  At the same time the first nationwide elections were authorized, followed by the creation of the Diet.

The post-war, 1947 Japanese Constitution made it clear that the cabinet (and therefor the civil service which it nominally controls) would thenceforth be responsible not to Emperor, but to the Diet.  But old habits die hard.  If the ministries were no longer responsible to the Emperor but to a Diet that many did not regard as particularly effective, one solution would be that they would come to regard themselves as being responsible mainly to themselves–and to their non-government constituencies.

Who Governs? Despite historical differences between the Japanese and European parliamentary/cabinet models, and with the exception of the period from the early 1930s through World War II when it was compromised by a cabinet dominated by the military, the Japanese career civil service has behaved admirably and according to the expectation that it is to serve the best interests of the nation as a whole.  Yet as the complexity of the issues faced by the country has increased, so has the perception that the career civil service, rather than the Diet and Cabinet, has become the de facto government of Japan.  One result has been that because of the Japanese system of lifetime employment in a single organization–in the case of government a single ministry–fragmentation of the government into a diverse set of interests has occurred, each interest represented by a ministry and, at least nominally, by a minister who is a member of the Cabinet and therefore shares in the executive authority of the government. 

The recently implemented reforms in which authority within each ministry is vested in political appointees who outrank the senior civil service are intended to redress the perceived balance of power between the elected Diet (and, by extension, the Cabinet) and the career civil service. But this provision is also intended to increase the transparency of government decision-making processes.  In an article in the January 2001 edition of Look Today Masakazu Doi, Associate Professor Law at Kyoto University, suggested that the bureaucracy has gotten a “bum rap” in the widespread perception that it has somehow seized control of the Japanese Government from the elected members of the Diet.  Unlike the US system in which major legislation proposed by the executive branch is subject to detailed scrutiny and often substantial modification by the legislative branch, most laws proposed by the Japanese Cabinet are almost invariably enacted by the Diet.  As a case in point, although there are Diet committees on science and technology in both the upper and lower houses, and although both committees hold hearings on the government’s proposed science and technology budgets, they almost never make changes in those budget requests, or at least have not done in recent memory.  Since for the past few years legislation considered by the Cabinet and Diet has almost invariably been drafted by members of the civil service, the presumption has been that the Diet's function is simply to provide a legal basis for programs devised by the various, fragmented ministries.

">But although on the basis of public evidence members of the Diet appear to exercise little power relative to the career civil service Doi, among others, maintains that this is not the case.  Rather than question the proposals of civil servants in open Diet sessions, influential members have close links in the upper reaches of the civil service.  In this way they are able to exert strong, often decisive influence over legislation drafted by specific ministries before it ever reaches the Cabinet, let alone the Diet.  According to this perspective, it may be the case that members of the Diet exert undue influence on a theoretically neutral civil service, contrary to the more common view that the politicians are relatively powerless relative to the career bureaucracy.

The January 6 reforms that insert politically-appointed State and Parliamentary Secretaries responsible to the Cabinet (and ultimately the Diet) near the apex of decision making in each ministry are intended to redress the perceived balance of authority between the ministries and the elected representatives of the nation.  In addition, as Doi points out, they are intended to make relationships between the Diet and the career civil service more transparent. In particular, the reforms are intended to correct what has been viewed as a system in which Diet members have exerted considerable influence privately, while claiming in public that they bore no responsibility for the consequences–both positive and negative–of their (heretofore largely unacknowledged) influence.

Prognosis

It is, of course, far too early to predict the extent to which these specific measures associated with the first of the four pillars of reform, or others associated with the remaining three pillars, will lead to the changes in the Japanese political and administrative system that they were designed to bring about.  [NB: aspects of the remaining pillars associated with the nation’s science and technology enterprise will be considered in a subsequent report.]  That, however, has not stopped commentators in the media from hazarding such predictions.  Former Prime Minister Hashimoto, who during his tenure was largely responsible for the government reform initiative, has returned to the Cabinet as Minister for Okinawa Affairs and Administrative Reform.  As such, he is responsible for many of the mechanics of the reform process. But the success of the reform measures will ultimately depend on the leadership of the Prime Minister and, in particular, his willingness and ability to make use of the new institutions placed at his disposal.  Thus far Prime Minister Yoshio Mori appears to have exhibited little interest in those institutions, no doubt because he is more concerned with his short-term political survival.  Hashimoto, for his part, is rumored to be furious at Mori’s apparent disinterest in the selection of appropriate candidates for the critical State Secretary and Parliamentary Secretary positions within the various ministries. 

As in the United States, the effectiveness of the institutions placed at the disposal of the executive authority to control the administration over which he presides depends on how skillfully he uses them.  As a case in point, the effectiveness of successive US presidential science advisors has clearly depended to a large degree on the willingness of the presidents they have served to turn to them for advice, and to support their proposed plans.  There is, however, one critical difference between the US and Japanese situations.  Whereas the US President is elected for a four year term and therefore has time to determine how best to use the executive institutions at his command, the Japanese Prime Minister’s tenure depends on how long he can maintain the confidence of a Diet in which, at present, no single party holds a majority.  The extent to which the institutions created (or modified) on January 6 can assert and maintain their effectiveness in the face of changes in the make up of the Cabinet and the identify of the Prime Minister which many observes believe may come about within the next six to 12 months remains to be seen.

Tadao Koike asserted in his January 2001 Look Japan article that the Prime Minister’s leadership will be critical in determining the effectiveness of the recent reforms.  He went on to add that their effectiveness will also require a change in the mind set of the career civil servants.  That is, civil servants must recognize that their responsibility is to administer measures adopted by the political leadership, rather than to exert undue influence on the con  They must also abandon the notorious territorial outlook that has become prevalent in recent years and has led to the erection of virtually impenetrable walls separating the government’s ministries and agencies, while making the good of the nation as a whole their highest priority.  This, of course, will take time, as well as determined political leadership.

Ultimately, of course, the effectiveness of any set of institutional arrangements depends critically upon the character of the individuals who occupy key positions within those institutions.  Importantly, it also depends upon the character of the personal relations between those key individuals and they way they function.  In the United States, institutional decisions are made more or less in the open, with disputes settled either by majority vote or by a ruling by the leader of an organization who is authorized to make final decisions.  In Japan, institutional decisions are often made in the shadows, depending much more on personal connections among key individuals than is the case in the United States. Moreover the Japanese, who dislike open confrontation, prefer to reach decisions by consensus rather than by majority vote or through the ruling of a single authority.  It remains to be seen whether the institutional arrangements that became effective on January 6 and were designed to improve the effectiveness of the nation’s political leadership can be accommodated to traits that appear to be deeply rooted in Japanese culture.