TOKYO, Jan. 30, 2021―In Akira Kurosawa’s highly-acclaimed 1952 film, ‘Ikiru,’ a mid-level Tokyo city official nearing his retirement, played by Takashi Shimura, is busy rubber-stamping documents and waiting for the work to end every day in a typical do-nothing bureaucrat manner. The film’s monotonous tone takes turns and the character morphs into a real living creature after he was diagnosed as terminally ill. He abruptly starts listening to and acts for the people that he had ignored for 30 years becoming a hero at his death
In the present real world, however, bureaucrats stick to the ‘Do Nothing’ policy and they observe it far more diligently than in 1952 busying at ‘creating’ work for themselves and getting paid far more than their private-sector peers. The number of Tokyo city area employees, at slightly more than 170,000 now, has been decreasing but the real Tokyo bureaucrat population is unknown because, unlike in 1952, many quasi-public corporations and other entities have been founded.
In a central city of less than 60,000 residents, one section of the city office, which previously assigned once officer to coordinate with local NPOs, added a new staffer two years ago. And when one NPO organized a city event, the section has assigned nearly half a dozen staffers, instead of three or so previously.
The city and the same NPO used to meet every month to coordinate for various events but from mid-2020, they decided to meet every other month. The city technically can use emails and other telecom means to coordinate details with the NPO but somehow, they increased the volume of documents substantially, making detailed prints of photos , maps and texts and one wondering how much time and resources had to be spent (wasted, partially) to produce such documents. It’s little wonder why the section added the second staffer.
At one of 23 Tokyo ‘ku’ city offices, a different variety of bureaucracy is being practiced. Unlike in 1952, when much of Tokyo city’s works had been administered directly by bureaucrats such as the Ikiru actor, Japanese public sector entities outsource enormous amounts of work to outside contractors ― office cleaning, libraries, public transportation, water safety, construction, and so on.
Those ku offices might have outsourced too many works, The Prospect’s research suggests. In one example, a ku’s one section has outsourced part of its sports facilities’ work to an NGO and another work to a different NGO. The ku’s sector instructed the head of the facility to coordinate among the facilities and two different NGOs. The result is a near bureaucratic impasse as none of the entities is volunteering to be in charge out of ‘consideration’ for other parties.
In the end, to break the deadlock, the ku’s section, which is responsible for the budget and planing for the sports facilities had to intervene, telling the three parties that the ku had received resident requests for change and had to administer. The ku section’s official in charge of the sports facilities told The Prospect that he had never made on-site visit to any of the facilities or talked to ku residents.
This is how bureaucrats are trained to become more bureaucratic than the Ikiru character before he learned about his terminal illness.
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