August 21, 2010
Are today’s bureaucrats people of the same caliber as those of the period up to twenty years ago, when men such as Kiichi Miyazawa and Mr. A, a distinguished senior alumnus of my alma mater, who played a major role in Japan’s miraculous recovery during the forty years after the war, and those who followed them served as bureaucrats?
Would Japan’s very best players really bring about twenty whole years of profound stagnation?
Twenty-five years ago, there was an era that the mass media labeled simply a “bubble.”
It was an era when classmates and younger alumni whom they considered far less capable than themselves began making enormous amounts of money.
The number and caliber of bureaucrats who, increasingly questioning and resenting having to serve Liberal Democratic Party politicians whose abilities were clearly inferior to their own, moved into the private sector, where they could expect far higher remuneration…Did a whole swath of the top-ranked people in each ministry leave?…The same question applies to the Bank of Japan.
I propose that now, more than ever, we should urgently compile a White Paper on the Bureaucracy and a White Paper on the Bank of Japan to examine precisely this.
Could it be that, starting twenty years ago, the ace-caliber officials in each ministry who could make bold decisions on the issues that needed resolving for the nation’s prosperity had, in fact, left in droves, while many of those who remained were bureaucrats capable only of thinking like local officials who do nothing but follow precedent, yet adept at protecting their own positions…at securing amakudari posts to see them through their retirement?
Would it not be more natural to think that this is why the tragedy of these twenty long years occurred?
Whatever else may be said, the successive Liberal Democratic Party prime ministers who brought about the miraculous recovery of the forty postwar years must have known all the outstanding bureaucrats in Kasumigaseki—their abilities, their qualities, and even their family circumstances.
Was that not, in fact, precisely the quality that enabled someone to become prime minister?
Compared with those successive prime ministers—those up until eighteen years ago—the Democratic Party politicians, who are needless to say immature as politicians, have been excessively conscious only of the mass media and have perhaps never done this work at all.
Prime Minister Kan should, by rights, have been doing precisely that work during this summer vacation, yet according to articles by beat reporters and insiders in the more decent magazines, he was apparently enjoying online games of Go…
I believe that this piece, too, makes an extremely important point.
Might the decline of the Liberal Democratic Party stem from the fact that, by eighteen years ago, it had entirely run out of people possessing those qualities and qualifications to be prime minister?
Know your enemy and know yourself, and you will not be imperiled in a hundred battles…Was it not because Japan knew neither its enemy nor itself that it kept losing for twenty years?…
Was that not what people called the stature of a leader?