The party that swept Japan’s weekend elections said on Tuesday it was ready to do battle with the mighty state bureaucracy to reduce civil servants’ smothering grip on the world’s number two economy.
The centre-left Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ), which ended more than half a century of conservative rule in Sunday’s landslide poll victory, has made wresting power from civil servants one of its main policy goals.
“The bureaucracy is using the politicians,” DPJ lawmaker Jin Matsubara said on the TV Asahi network, deploring the entrenched practice of lawmakers rubber-stamping decisions made by the unaccountable officials.
The premier-in-waiting, Yukio Hatoyama, has pledged to deploy 100 lawmakers to supervise ministries and claw back power from Japan’s 360 000 bureaucrats who wield far greater clout than their peers in other democracies.
Hatoyama, a United States-trained engineering scholar and scion of an old political dynasty, campaigned on a promise of change and people-centred politics against the outgoing Liberal Democratic Party of Prime Minister Taro Aso.
When he takes over Aso’s post in mid-September, he wants to set up a new National Strategy Bureau under his control to shape key policies and draft the national budget — until now the job of the Finance Ministry.
“So far, the Finance Ministry has stapled together budget requests from individual ministries and agencies, and then the Cabinet rubber-stamps it,” said the DPJ’s Renho, an upper-house member who goes by one name.
Hatoyama’s close aide Hirofumi Hirano said the DPJ and the bureaucracy’s mandarins were now “poised, watching who will stab first or be stabbed”.
While Japan’s next premier huddled on Tuesday with DPJ officials and smaller opposition parties to shape the next government, other figures of his party took to the airwaves and joined in the technocrat-bashing.
Matsubara argued that Japan’s state bureaucrats tend to be so narrowly focused and driven by their ministries’ vested interests that they lost sight of the big picture and the interests of the people.
“There is a saying, ‘specialty fool,'” Matsubara said, using an expression for specialists who lack wider common sense. “We shouldn’t be like that.”
In Japan, the heads of ministries, who carry the rank of vice minister, are often considered more powerful than the politicians they ostensibly serve.
When top bureaucrats retire, they tend to parachute into cushy jobs in the companies and agencies they formerly supervised — a practice called “descent from heaven” widely blamed for fostering bid-rigging and corruption.
The DPJ won Sunday’s landmark election victory in the lower house on a promise of sweeping change from the LDP style of politics, in which the party and the bureaucrats formed close and opaque ties with the corporate sector.
The DPJ has pledged to put people before companies and direct cash handouts to families with small children and subsidies to farmers, financing the new spending by cutting waste elsewhere without raising taxes.
At least one top bureaucrat said he was coming on board.
Vice Minister Yasutake Tango, the top Finance Ministry official, said he was ready to follow instructions from a new government, telling a news conference: “We must work appropriately if a new government has a new policy.” — AFP