***** The New York Times January 4, 2001, Thursday, Late Edition - Final SECTION: Section A; Page 3; Column 1; Foreign Desk HEADLINE: Official Japan Does Musical Chairs, and Desks BYLINE: By STEPHANIE STROM DATELINE: TOKYO, Jan. 3
...The Japanese government is in the throes of the biggest reorganization in more than a century. Over the last several weeks, some 540,000 officials have been engaged in a giant game of musical chairs as 23 ministries and agencies consolidate themselves into 13 on Jan. 6, part of a grand plan to streamline Japan's powerful bureaucracy and, in the process, weaken its grip on Japanese life.
The 128 bureaus inside those ministries and agencies will be whittled to 96, and the number of advisory bodies serving them to 89 from 211....
Plans for the reorganization began four years ago, when Japan was racked by a deepening economic recession and its financial system teetered close to collapse. The failure of Japan's vaunted economic miracle exposed the shortcomings and high costs of leaving decisions and regulation to career civil servants, who traditionally held the upper hand in forming policy, with the politicians acting as a rubber stamp.
But with the economic crisis, the politicians led by then-Prime Minister Ryutaro Hashimoto, a driven advocate of conservative reform, clamored to take hold of the reins of government themselves.
Whether the plan will fulfill its promise to wrest power from officials and hand it over to politicians -- and more importantly, whether the politicians will be any more adroit than the bureaucrats at managing things -- remains to be seen.
The expertise of the bureaucratic ranks, coupled with the relative weakness of Japanese politicians, all but ensures that the bureaucrats will continue to dominate policy-making. Already critics charge that the Financial Services Agency, supposedly an independent watchdog, is staffed with so many former officials from the Ministry of Finance that it is little more than a colony of the ministry that formerly had its job.
Still, it is early for judgments. For now, the exercise is a purely logistical one involving moving companies, box makers, printers and the like in a massive shakeup that is expected to cost Japanese taxpayers at least 33.2 billion yen, or $287 million....
Ms. Iki's Women's Bureau is merging with the Children's and Families Bureau of the Health and Welfare Ministry when the ministry merges with the Labor Ministry to become the Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare. The new bureau, to be called the Equal Employment, Children and Families Bureau, will start out split between the 5th and the 18th floors until April, when the entire bureau will move to the 13th floor. "Right now, the chaos is at its peak," Ms. Iki said last Friday. "We don't know whose working where."
There will be one very obvious change in Ms. Iki's bureau: "The Women's Bureau has very few men, and the Children's and Families Bureau has very few women, so we'll be working with a lot more men than before," she said.
The merger of the two bureaus is supposed to bring about cost savings by eliminating redundant work, so far the budget for the single, new bureau has actually risen. "Put simply, that's so," Ms. Iki said. "But it's more complicated than that."
She explained that the overall budget had increased because of the introduction of new policies, like a system of payments to encourage Japanese families to have more children. "If you look at it line by line, though, some items have been cut from several million yen to zero."
As for redundant jobs, the government intends to cut 135,000 public employees -- 25 percent of the total -- over the next decade, largely through attrition. Some of those will retire, but officials hope that many will be absorbed into the private sector.
The Equal Employment, Children and Families Bureau will have four fewer posts than the combined number of jobs in the two bureaus that merged to create it, Ms. Iki said.
In fact, Ms. Iki herself fell victim to her own reform efforts. "I'm going to be reassigned to the Employment Security Bureau because my post will be erased through this reorganization," she said.... *****