The points made by Professor Thies are well taken.

The only point I wanted to make is that those who seen an unbridgeable divide
between previous case studies on Japanese policy making and rational choice are
missing the point.

As a matter of fact a large amount of case studies written in Japanese, as far
as I know, have been carried out by specialists in public administration. Anyone
who has been required to read C. Bernard and Simon knows that even in
hierarchies where formal authorities lies at the apex, superiors are dependent
on subordinates but have tools to manage/steer operations of their subordinate
groups. Furthermore, Public Administration specialists in the UK such as A.
Dunsire and C. Hood have further elaborated on how "principals" can/may control
"agents," although not in those terms. And such text were introduced in Japan
even when I was a student (one reason why the UK has become a popular spot for
Japanese public administrations scholars, I think).

So to me "a reconceptualization of the relationship between burs and pols as one
of delegation and not as a power struggle" doesn't seem like a huge step
forward, unless one takes seriously only journalistic accounts of policy making.
On the contrary, I have seen very little that would adhere to any kind of "power
struggle" view.

But the point is, now that we agreed on "delegation" (I still cannot imagine a
real case of abdication....) and that the next step is "comparative statics" I
think a lot can be learned by reviewing previous work through the "scanner" of
P-A theory, which makes us think through clearly what we regarded as common
wisdom or descriptive knowledge, instead of dismissing what has been accumulated
as obsolete or irrelevant. Thus making "comparative static" hypothesis might not
be so difficult once we shed the "appearance" of a divide between previous
studies and rational choice. As a matter of fact, now I'm not sure if rational
choice-non rational choice is the issue.

Which brings me back full circle.

Nobuhiro Hiwatari