Japan Revamps, Reduces Ministries

In a move of epic proportions aimed at expanding efficiency and shifting the power balance from bureaucrats to politicians, Japan on Saturday cut its number of national ministries and agencies nearly in half.

Hallways throughout Tokyo’s Kasumigaseki district, the base of the central government, were piled high with more than 130,000 boxes as bureaucrats scurried to find mislaid documents, and moving vans outside disgorged more in the biggest such revamp since World War II.

The government has not provided an official cost for the operation, but some estimates place it in excess of $350 million. At a more fundamental level, critics and many ordinary citizens quickly criticized the move as long on form but short on substance.

“The container has been remodeled,” the Asahi newspaper said in a front-page story Saturday. “Now the question is what’s inside.”

While the changes, which have been in the works for at least three years, arguably are a first step toward reforming Japan’s over-regulated society, they provide no clear blueprint for handling some of the nation’s biggest problems. These include the beleaguered economy, public debt that exceeds 130% of gross domestic product, a ponderous decision-making process and critical social welfare issues related to schooling and a rapidly aging population.

Japan has come under growing criticism both at home and abroad during the last decade for the strong grip its ministries hold on a wide range of details affecting almost every aspect of daily life. Even the water temperature in community bathhouses has been subject to their meddling. But it wasn’t until a string of ministry scandals concerning economic mismanagement and HIV-tainted blood products rocked the nation in recent years that momentum for the restructuring reached critical mass.

That erosion of prestige marked a sharp contrast to the high marks Japan’s elite administrators were given in the 1960s and ‘70s, when the nation staged a miraculous economic rise from the ashes of World War II and the term “Japan Inc.” became familiar around the world.

Under the reorganization, 22 ministries and agencies were reduced as of Saturday to 12. A new Cabinet office also was created putting more power in the hands of the prime minister. And 70 lawmakers are being assigned to the ministries as watchdogs.

The government has set a goal of slimming its army of 540,000 bureaucrats by 136,000 over the next decade, largely through attrition.

“We must carry out drastic reforms,” Prime Minister Yoshiro Mori said in a statement issued after his first Cabinet meeting under the new system.

Many Japanese remain skeptical, however. A poll conducted in late December by the Yomiuri newspaper, the nation’s largest, found that only 19% of respondents thought the structural reform would make the prime minister more effective, while 78% either anticipated no change in the government’s effectiveness or thought restructuring would make things worse.

“To be honest, I don’t see this making much difference any time soon,” Yoshiaki Kazuta, a 47-year-old insurance company employee in Tokyo, said this morning.

A big question is whether the move will do much to reduce Japan’s infamous interministry turf battles or just move them inside the newly formed mega-ministries.

The change also has led to intense debates inside ministry walls over such minutiae as whether section chiefs should face or have their backs to windows and how far up the chain officials should be before they’re given a hanko, or official seal, which costs as much as $3,000 and allows them to sign off on decisions.

“We are trying to remove this sectionalism barrier,” Chief Cabinet Secretary Yasuo Fukuda told a news conference Saturday.

Some of the groupings also seem to make little sense, including the pairing of the telecommunications and local government affairs functions under the new Ministry of Public Management, Home Affairs, Posts and Telecommunications.

Critics also fear that the reorganization--whose broad intent is to wrest power from the mandarins in the bureaucracy and put it in the hands of elected officials--might backfire by giving now-larger bureaucratic structures even more clout and a greater control over information, a key source of their power.

The new Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport, for example, will control an estimated 80% of all public works projects nationwide, even as Japan frets that such spending is out of control.