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From Technocracy to Aristocracy: The Changing Career Paths of Japanese Politicians

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 March 2016

Christopher Titus North
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Abstract

My study investigates whether there has been a relative decline in the position of the Japanese bureaucracy in their relationship with politicians in recent decades. My hypothesis is that the loss of bureaucratic influence has been a function of the declining position of former bureaucrats within the ruling Liberal Democrat Party (LDP), and that politicians who were able to enter the Diet at a young age (due to hereditary recruitment) have gained influence. Their seniority has placed them at an advantage in promotion to key party and government posts. I use probit and logit analysis of LDP cabinet and Diet members (1955–2003) to demonstrate the decline of former bureaucrats within the LDP in terms of their overall numbers and their occupancy of key posts.

Keywords

administrativereformzokubureaucracyJapanLDPsecond-generationcabinetpoliticiansseniority
Type
Articles
Information
Journal of East Asian Studies , Volume 5 , Issue 2 , August 2005 , pp. 239 - 272
Copyright
Copyright © East Asia Institute 

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References

Notes

1. Johnson, Chalmers, MITI and the Japanese Miracle: The Growth of Japanese Industrial Policy, 1925–1975 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1982), pp. 45–46; Okimoto, Daniel I., Between MITI and the Market: Japanese Industrial Policy for High Technology (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1989), pp. 216–225.Google Scholar

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3. Elsewhere, I provide a comparative case study of three cabinet-backed administrative reform efforts (the original Provisional Administrative Reform Commission in the early 1960s, the Second Provisional Administative Reform Commission in the early 1980s, and the Administrative Reform Council in the late 1990s). I find evidence supporting the notion that former high-ranking bureaucrats who dominated the LDP in its early era allied themselves with the Ministry of Finance (MOF) and the rest of the bureaucracy in opposing and watering down the administrative reform efforts of the earliest case, while the second-generation politicians who dominated the party during the 1990s showed no such inclination to protect the bureaucracy, paving the way for the passage of significant reforms despite opposition from MOF and the bureaucracy. See North, Christopher Titus, From Technocracy to Aristocracy: The Changing Career Paths of Japanese Politicians (Ph.D. diss., University of Pittsburgh, 2003).Google Scholar

4. Johnson, Chalmers, MITI and the Japanese Miracle, pp. 20–21.Google Scholar

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10. Ibid..Google Scholar

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13. Ibid., p. 142.Google Scholar

14. Okimoto, , Between MITI and the Market, pp. 181, 219.Google Scholar

15. Ohmae, Kenichi, Heisei Kanryouron (Tokyo: Shougakukan, 1994), pp. 16–20.Google Scholar

16. Ibid., p. 75.Google Scholar

17. Muramatsu, Michio, ed., Sengo no Nippon Kanryousei (Tokyo: Toyo Keizai Shinposha, 1981), p. 15.Google Scholar

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20. Inoguchi, Takashi and Iwai, Tomoaki, “Zoku Giin” no Kenkyuu. Google Scholar

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22. Ibid., p. 49.Google Scholar

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25. The data on Diet and cabinet members have been collected and cross-referenced from a number of sources, the most important of which are internal-use election abstracts kindly made available to me by the Asahi Shimbun (newspaper); Seijika Jinmei Jiten (Japanese Statesmen: A Biographical Dictionary) (Tokyo: Nichigai Associates, 1990, 2000); Sato, Seizaburo and Matsuzaki, Tetsuhisa, Jiminto Seiken (Tokyo: Chuo Koronsha, 1986). Secondary sources include newspaper reports of election results and websites maintained by the Japanese government, major political parties, major newspapers, and respected academic institutions. I chose the lower houses elected in 1963, 1983, and 1996 because they were responsible for passing legislation based on the recommendations of three deliberative councils charged with devising administrative reform plans that are the focus of the case studies in the dissertation from which this paper was extracted. The other lower houses were chosen in order to get a fairly even distribution over time.Google Scholar

26. A person who is elected to the lower house is credited each time with one seniority point. Thus, “Senior” generally refers to the number of times a person has been elected to the lower house. However, in the case where a lower house member first served in the upper house (which is typically no more than 5 percent of lower house members), that person is credited with one “Senior” point for each three years or fraction thereof served in the upper house, which is the convention used in the LDP. While the Diet also consists of an upper house, that body is less powerful, and examination of the Diet will focus on the lower house.Google Scholar

27. Johnson, , MITI and the Japanese Miracle, p. 47; Okimoto, , Between MITI and the Market, p. 219.Google Scholar

28. Actually, the seniority system in the bureaucracy only became rigid following World War II.Google Scholar

29. Murakami, Yasusuke, “The Japanese Model of Political Economy.” In Yamamura, Kozo and Yasuba, Yasukichi, eds., The Political Economy of Japan, vol. 1: The Domestic Transformation (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1987), pp. 62, 69-70.Google Scholar

30. Probit analysis was also conducted and the results are very similar.Google Scholar

31. Including reappointments and duel portfolios, the numbers break down as follows: 1,422 for lower house members, 209 for upper house members, and 23 for non-Diet members.Google Scholar

32. Kishi and Sato were also brothers, despite different family names.Google Scholar

33. Some ministers were both former bureaucrats and second-generation politicians (seven during the 1955–1969 period and eleven in each of the two following periods.Google Scholar

34. Thirteen individuals who were not members of the Diet have served a total of twenty-four stints in the cabinet during the 1955–2004 period. Seven of these individuals were former bureaucrats and one was a child of a politician, but because they were not themselves politicians at the time of their appointment to the cabinet, they were considered neither FB nor Nisei in Table 9 and Figure 1. There was never more than one of these nonpolitician former bureaucrats in the cabinet at one time.Google Scholar

35. Amakudari means “descent from heaven” and refers to jobs arranged for retiring bureaucrats.Google Scholar

36. North, , From Technocracy to Aristocracy. Google Scholar

37. Inoguchi, Takashi and Iwai, Tomoaki, “Zoku Giin” no Kenkyuu. Google Scholar

38. Examples of the popular assumption that zoku politicians and bureaucrats work together to thwart reform can be found in Shinoda, Tomohito, Hashimoto's Leadership in Administrative Reform, IUJ Research Institute Working Paper, Asia Pacific Series No. 13, available at http://www.iuj.ac.jp/research/wpap013.cfm); and “Poor Diet Policy Debate,” editorial in Asahi Shimbun, October 15, 2004.Google Scholar