Administrative Reform in Japan: Politics, Policy, and Public Administration in a Deliberative Society

Abstract

From automobiles to television sets and from quality control to management theory (e.g., Theory Z), the ''exports of Japan are becoming increasingly familiar elements of interest, use, and concern to Americans. Importing ideas (as well as commodities) from abroad can be a significant element in influencing a nation's developmental course. The Founding Fathers in the United States in 1787 consciously took into account the experiences (both contemporary and historical) of governance problems and strategies of western European nations (see The Federalist papers). From a borrowing or learning standpoint Japan has long been identified as a successful imitator. After World War II, Japanese leaders sought and secured not only capital for reconstruction of that nation's physical facilities, but also obtained conceptual and theoretical ideas about the design of operating systems. The story of the advice received from William Edward Deming, for whom a prestigious Japanese award is named, is legendary, but it is also true. This sketch of international borrowing and learning, involving both Japan and the United States (U.S.), evokes the extensive economic and political relationships between the two nations over the past four decades. Those interwoven and interdependent connections make it all the more interesting, as well as somewhat ironic, that there has been relatively little interchange, information sharing, and learning across the respective paths that public administration and public management have followed in the two nations. (For an exception, see Bingman, 1985.) A major gap exists in the mutual monitoring of public administration developments between the continental colossus of the U.S. and the Island Inc. of the Japanese archipelago. The aim in this essay is to reduce this gap in one small way. This is done through a largely descriptive analysis of the policy that has been called administrative reform in Japan. The singular focus is on Japanese administrative reform, not similar reform efforts in the U.S., e.g., Carter reorganization proposals, Grace Commission reports. Further, this essay is basically for the U.S. audience. Administrative reform has achieved wide attention in Japan and has been the subject of considerable academic analysis and political commentary there.'