TOKYO, May 9, 2024—At a May 1, 2024 meeting with Minamata mercury poisoning – widely known as one of the world’s first industrial pollution case – victims in Minamata City, Kyushu, a Japanese Ministry of the Economy bureaucrat abruptly turned off the mic of two victims speaking about their experiences and appealing for the state’s apologies and continuing support to the minister, Shintaro Ito, for exceeding their allotted 3 minutes each – clearly too short to explain their plight. (https://japannews.yomiuri.co.jp/politics/politics-government/20240508-184842/)
On May 8, Ito revisited Minamato to apologize to the victims but the name of the ministry official who disconnected the microphone or what kind of administrative punishment if any was taken about him was not available. A MOE Special Disease Policy Office official declined to comment when asked on the phone by The Prospect. The head of the MOE press office, Nobuyuki Konuma, told The Prospect May 9 in a phone conversation that the minister orally reprimanded vice MOE administrator and the Environment Insurance deputy director general for the incident. No penal action was leveled on the two bureaucrats, he said.
A classic bureaucracy work
At a Scout gathering, the leader might say a few words about a schedule and safety after introducing her/himself. That’s fill up 3 minutes. But the 1965 Minamata Disease case, which was globally known by photographer Eugene Smith’s work and continues to affect victims to this day, cannot possibly be explained in three minutes. It demands human voice from the victims’ souls and bodies. They needed at least 10 minutes each and perhaps more. Yet, for the MOE bureaucracy, who do not want the victims to refresh their painful memories and with it, make new demands, 3 minutes was the most given to the victims. Plus, once decided – in this case, 3 minutes for each – the Japanese bureaucracy proceeds rigidly on schedule, no matter what (unless someone gets killed).
That’s part of policy planning and execution that the Japanese bureaucracy had prided itself in engineering and guiding the nation over the past 175 years after japan opened its doors to the world.
But excluding perhaps during the first decades of those years, they have become experts at drawing what they think are best but poor at applications.
Case in point relating to the MOE are most of its greenhouse gas reduction programs written jointly with the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry and other government offices. They failed and Japan’s GHG emissions are overshooting targets to stem growth to less than 2 percent by 2030 compared with 2013 levels by slashing emissions by 46 percent.
It won’t happen: Japan generates only about 23 percent of total electricity consumption with solar and other renewable energy, while the world average is 29 percent, according to International Energy Agency data.
Japan also claims that it would accelerate the deployment of EVs, hydrogen fuel cell vehicles but it is woefully short of charging stations, which totaled less than 10,000 for quick charging and 23,000 for slow charging, a far cry from what the government trumpeted several years ago in voluminous policies papers that hundreds of bureaucrats spent months overtime to draft.
So what were those documents for? They gave work to government employees and politicians to read at international conferences. That’s policy planning. What happened at the Minamata meeting was the bureaucrats forgot about the consequence of delivery as they myopically concentrated on planning alone.
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