Just a few responses to Brian's comments about the real difficulties that any Japanese government might face in seeking to impose more political direction on the Japanese bureaucracy....Some key conditions might be:

1. A change in the view of the role of the public servant away from public servants as independent officials and trustees for the state (e.g. the Germanic/Prussian rechtsstaat view) to public servants as primarily agents of the elected government (the Anglo-American principal-agent view). In other words, you need a cultural/attitudinal shift in the public service. Just viewing themselves as public "servants"
rather than public "officials" would be a start.

2. A change in the career structure for top public servants away from spending their careers solely in one department/ministry to seeing themselves primarily as government servants who can serve in more than one agency and need to do so in order to advance up the rankings. What is needed here, in other words, is a fluid meritocracy across all major ministries, which would help to break down the current rigid loyalty structures in which bureaucrats are enculturated primarily to promote and defend their ministry's interests and to identify their own self-interests primarily with those of their ministries.

3. A shift in the institutional conditions for change - i.e. the constitutional ease of making structural changes in the bureaucracy away from major legislative change (Germanic) more towards administrative orders (Westminster). This would increase the capacity of central government (cabinet and central agencies) to impose change on line agencies.

4. Abolition of promotions based on seniority, amakudari and compulsory retirement age.

I don't see any of these changes on Abe's drawing board. Moreover, as Brian points out, what he is proposing will elicit countervailing reactions from the bureaucracy, which could sabotage the intent of his reform. The article by Isabel Reynolds was rather sensational in its title - the power shift that Abe is threatening nowhere near rivals MacArthur's reforms unless you think that the latter were superficial.

Best wishes,

Aurelia George Mulgan
Professor
School of Humanities and Social Sciences University of New South Wales Canberra, Australia http://www.eastasiaforum.org/author/aureliageorgemulgan