JAPAN : Feisty Health Minister Goes to the Mat With Bureaucrats

In Japan, where bureaucrats write the laws, chart the nation’s course and manipulate many politicians from the shadows, Health Minister Naoto Kan has shattered conventions.

With his straightforward, grass-roots appeal and earthy oratory, the 48-year-old Kan has taken on the bureaucrats and challenged their grasp on political power.

In the seven months since he assumed his post, this reformist politician from the New Party Harbinger has tackled an HIV scandal, worked to repeal Japan’s long outdated leprosy law and introduced a public insurance plan to provide nursing care for the elderly. But most remarkable of all, he has dared to openly criticize the elite bureaucrats who wield influence in Japan’s world of back-room politics.

“According to the constitution, the parliament should control the bureaucrats,” said Kan. “But the bureaucrats don’t understand that.”

Kan rocketed to fame in February when he forced bureaucrats to hand over documents revealing the Health Ministry’s role in an HIV scandal in which at least 5,000 Japanese contracted the human immunodeficiency virus, which causes AIDS, through transfusions of contaminated blood.

Until then, bureaucrats had denied that the documents existed. The discovery led to the settlement of a lawsuit filed by HIV-infected hemophiliacs and five pharmaceutical companies.

Japan’s bureaucrat-led system brought peace and prosperity in the post-World War II era. For decades the goals of the bureaucrats and citizens were one: to catch up economically with the West and keep the region secure. But times have changed, said Kan, and bureaucrats still have the same goals they had 50 years ago.

“Our nation is flying on autopilot, with policies set by the bureaucrats,” Kan said. “The autopilot has to be turned off. If not, our nation will crash. Our nation has lost its course.”

Kan is not your typical Japanese politician.

He favors a tan suit, not a politician’s gray. He gestures with his hands, reaching out to his audience, rather than holding his arms stiffly at his sides. He fields questions from reporters, straying from texts prepared by bureaucrats. He is passionate and committed.

“Until Kan’s tenure, politically appointed ministers did not have any control over the system,” said Miyamoto Masao, a former Health Ministry official who wrote “Straitjacket Society,” a scathing critique of Japan’s bureaucracy. “Kan . . . has achieved something unprecedented among recent Japanese ministers.”

His take-action ways irk bureaucrats, who complain that Kan ignores protocol and rushes into reforms, and stir jealousy among some of his fellow politicians. Coalition partners have refused to pass his proposed insurance for the elderly as a way to bully him, media reports say.

But he is a hero in the eyes of ordinary people, getting sackfuls of fan mail every day and ranking as Japan’s most popular politician in polls.

“We have waited 30 years for a politician like Kan,” said Tamotsu Asami, a political reporter for Yomiuri Shimbun, Japan’s largest newspaper.

Political analysts say an unusual set of circumstances helped make Kan’s meteoric rise possible. First, he is granted an unusual degree of autonomy as a member of the tiny New Party Harbinger, which carries the swing vote in the ruling coalition. And in the case of the HIV scandal, the media were solidly behind Kan, making it hard for the bureaucrats to foil him.

But no one can say whether Kan’s victories mark the beginning of a slow shift of power from the bureaucrats to the politicians.