Japanese Public Bureaucracy in the Era of Globalization

Abstract

Since the late 1990s, Japanese public bureaucracy has dramatically adapted to the international movement toward new public management. The concept was introduced into Japanese public administration through the Policy Evaluation System (Gyousei Hyouka Seido) for the central government. Bernard S. Silberman, addressing Max Weber’s famous hypothesis of state bureaucratic rationalization, pointed out the divergence of bureaucratic structures in developed countries, and questioned differences between the United States and United Kingdom, and Japan and France. Silberman considered rationalization as a response to political crisis, aiming toward a redefinition of the relationship between the public and political domain. If so, I may claim the convergence of Japanese bureaucratic structure to the A nglo-Saxon type. A lso, according to David Held’s perspectives, I will try to explore the impact of globalization on Japanese public bureaucracy, and to reconsider Japanese administrative think ing in light of the Japanese way of adapting to foreign think ing since the opening of Japan to the world. From what has been discussed above, I am left with the following questions : Why does not the Japanese public bureaucracy, explicitly or implicitly, reject NPM reform, since it will result in more control from politicians ? Why does the public bureaucracy seem to be self-contradictory, maintaining the traditional bureaucratic identity of Rechtsstaat (administration proactively conducted by legal discipline) in spite of embracing managerialism focused on efficiency and effectiveness ? How will the above newly reformed dichotomy between politicians and bureaucrats gradually evolve towards new governance based on civic engagement in Japan ?

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