On perhaps a somewhat "lower" level, another test case is the effort to create a "Japan NIH -- National Institutes of Health" by which the Prime Minister means not a replication of the US NIH (which has a budget of around $25-30 billion and several tens of thousands of
staff) but a process that will centralize the healthcare-related R&D budgets of MHLW, MEXT, and METI to make R&D more efficient and strategically focused.
The DPJ tried this and after 9 months the Director of the office working on this (a world-class medical
researcher) held a press conference, expressed his frustration, and announced that he was quitting and moving to Chicago where he could commercialize his research. The Chief Cabinet Secretary seems to be personally vested in this effort now. It will be at least a year, I think, before there will be any signs of how this effort is working. I recognize that it is not quite the same, perhaps, as shifting responsibility from bureaucrats to politicians (since the office doing this in the Cabinet Office is staffed by bureaucrats from the three ministries), but it is an interesting and important effort to change the way in which the three bureaucracies normally work.

Ira Wolf
Tokyo