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Asian model of government re-examined in the aftermath of the global economic crunch: a Japanese perspective from the experience of the triple disasters in March 2011

This article addresses three related issues about the role and functions of government in East Asia in general and Japan in particular. First, it tries to describe the important function of national bureaucracy in Japan’s economic growth, a development mode that has often been labelled ‘statism’ or ‘administrative centred government’. The first section delineates how this model became entrenched in the country. Second, the article highlights several reform attempts to alter this basic configuration of Japanese government power, through efforts to dilute the control of bureaucracy and replace it with an ‘executive centred government’. The second section dwells on this transition and evaluates the results of different reform efforts. Finally, the article examines the effect of the disasters in March 2011 on these aspects of the country’s leadership, noting that the incumbent party leaders had little faith in the wisdom of mandarins, and planned to resolve the ongoing crises by themselves. The final section of the article deals with the schisms and fissures of the interface between electived members and non-elected administrators within the context of Japan’s crises. Points for practitioners The article first describes the ‘statism’ traditional in Japan. How Japanese bureaucrats devised a method to foster rapid development of the country during the 1960s and the early 1970s is the central focus of this section. Subsequently, this article examines the Hashimoto and Koizumi administrations and discusses to what extent they succeeded in entrenching ‘an executive centred government’ to replace the traditional statism mode of management. Later, the article touches on the mammoth earthquake that struck northern Japan on 11 March 2011. The Democratic Party of Japan had to deal with the crises within the confines of the statism legacy.