Youngsters are fleeing Japan’s once-mighty civil service

These days it is winter for Japan’s once-mighty civil service. Talented cadres are fleeing harsh work conditions in search of greater opportunities and more flexibility. The number of elite “career-track” civil servants who quit within their first ten years on the job has hit record highs in the past two years. Applications for civil-servant positions fell by 30% between 2012 and 2023. The share of graduates from the University of Tokyo, Japan’s top university, among those who passed the career-track exam declined from 32% in 2000 to less than 10% this year. Today’s best and brightest prefer jobs at startups.

That may be welcome news for Japan Inc. But the exodus of talent from the public sector also has worrying implications. Even though their power has waned since Kazagoshi’s era, bureaucrats still play an outsize part in Japan’s policymaking process. Parliamentarians have skeleton staffs and often turn to mandarins for legislative support. In Japan civil servants “play a political role”, notes Steven Vogel of the University of California, Berkeley. At a time when Japan faces complex challenges, from managing an ageing population to grappling with new technologies such as artificial intelligence, it can ill afford a hollowed-out civil service.

The future of the bureaucracy is a pressing issue as the ruling Liberal Democratic Party prepares to elect a new leader on September 27th to replace Kishida Fumio, the outgoing prime minister. Kono Taro, a leading candidate, has served thrice as minister for administrative reform (in addition to stints atop the digital, defence and foreign ministries, among other posts); he made a name for himself in part by waging war against outdated technologies still prevalent in the Japanese state, such as fax machines and floppy disks. Keizai Doyukai, a big business association, called overhauling the bureaucracy an “urgent” matter for upcoming reform.

You need only visit Kasumigaseki, Tokyo’s central government district, late at night to grasp the problem. After the subways close, taxis mass around ministry buildings as if they were nightclubs. Often the cause of late nights is last-minute requests from lawmakers to prepare answers for hearings the next day. When responding to such queries, bureaucrats tend to finish work around 1am—leaving a few hours to sleep before attending parliament. One former foreign ministry official who quit to be a consultant recalls working 100 hours of overtime each month during his first two years.

The Japanese government is a microcosm of the worst of the country’s office culture. Some now refer to Kasumigaseki as a “black” workplace—code for exploitative conditions and a harsh work culture. Archaic and analogue ways of doing business still reign. An insular, seniority-based promotion system constrains the career prospects of recruits. Bullying by politicians is all too common, and goes unpunished. “If you are sane, why would you do this work?” says one parliamentarian. “The smart ones are leaving—and we feel it.”

The solution lies in part in less red tape for civil servants themselves. Kawamoto Yuko, the current head of the National Personnel Authority, spent years at McKinsey and has sought to modernise government workplaces. But deep changes are necessary, and will require greater political will. A previous set of civil-service reforms enacted in 2014 rightly put more power in elected politicians’ hands, but failed to clarify new roles for the mandarins. Ministries remain too isolated—from each other and the private sector. More senior positions should be opened up to outside hires on the basis of expertise and performance. A nimbler, more modern civil service would set an example for the rest of Japan. And it would prove a better foundation for solving the problems of the coming decades. Time, in short, for the bureaucrats to have their spring.

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