JAPAN USED TO be a country which, following the British model, had an independent and in principle apolitical civil sendee, with the power of appointment and promotion kept in civil servants’ hands. The main difference was that in Japan civil sendee careers were usually careers-for-life in the ministry into which they were initially recruited by competitive exam. There was little of the shuffling around from ministry to ministry as happens in Britain. The permanent secretary at Transport was someone who had been at Transport for the whole of his career. This led to a significant difference in levels of intelligence and efficiency between the elite ministries that everyone vied to enter, i.e. Finance, MITI, Foreign Ministry and the Police on the one hand, and the less prestigious ministries, Transport, Labour, Health and Welfare, etc. on the other.

The other difference was that the civil servants of the elite ministries had a better reputation for intelligence and honesty than the average politician. The resentment this generated led to twenty years of what the Japanese call ‘bureaucratbashing’ heavily supported by the media and by both political parties. This, combined with the increasing number both of politicians and bureaucrats (as well as of business men and people in the media) who had spent a couple of years in an American business school or graduate school (the ‘brain washed generation’), generated an Americanizing trend which is still in full swing. The American system in which 3,000 top bureaucrats can be replaced by incoming presidents, is now widely regarded as superior. The present Abe government has presented a draft law, which will require the vetting by politicians of the governing party of all civil servants who are candidates for senior positions.

But the prospect of such a law (three previous administrations of both the main political parties had presented similar bills but had them timed out, thanks in large part to bureaucrats’ delaying tactics) has had a serious effect on the willingness of bureaucrats to stand up to politicians.