TOKYO, Jan. 6, 2019 – How many people need to be sacrificed before the Japanese public realizes that their bureaucracy that originates in the samurai class are the culprit of the country’s downfall from from a technology and economic empire to an also-run of the global marketplace. In contrast to the samurai image as the honorable guards of the Shogun and civilians, the bureaucrats’ top priority over centuries has shifted into mundane man creature pursuits – fame, promotion and money – at the expense of the private sector. The samurai bureaucrats would test the sharpness of their new swords by severing the torsos of innocent homeless people; beheaded or sent to remote islands hundreds of honest, starving peasants of famine-stricken regions who pleaded for tax relief; dispatched tens of thousands of soldiers without giving them ammunition and food to Southeast Asia to fight against western forces, forcing most of them to die of starvation and others by enemy bullets. Over recent decades, their power had weakened with the ascendance of private-sector wealth as well as a result of the bursting of the bubble economy in the early 1990s, which the public blamed as the cause of the stock market crash and high employment But now, they are regaining power and authority with the help of Shinzo Abe, the prime minister whose grandfather he adores was a bureaucrat-turned prime minister who was instrumental to Japan’s brief colonization of parts of China in the 1940s.
On Oct. 11, 1667, about 60 years after the 250-year-long Edo period began, San-emon Horikoshi, the head peasant of the Midori farming region of Kozu Counrtry (now Takasaki City, Gunma Prefecture) was bound tightly onto the cross and executed at the neighboring Ogushi Matsubara execution place. Horikoshi’s family members, except his eldest son, also were caught and beheaded. Earlier the same year, the 37-year-old San-emon pleaded to the region’s domain lord Takumi Kurahashi’s magistrate office for tax relief because of draught-stricken poor harvest . But he was not only refused his plea but also was ordered to pay even higher taxes. Angry, he bade farewell to his wife and children and walked all the way to Edo (now Tokyo), his plea letter hidden deep inside his straw hat, and with trickery managed to hand the letter directly to the Shogunate office. Enraged by the head peasant’s action, Kurahashi ordered San-emon be arrested for making a direct plea to the Shogunate, a crime subject to capital punishment. Emboldened by San-emon’s act, Ichiemon Miki, the head of Kokuryu village not far from Midori village attempted an aborted direct plea to the Shogunate in 1668 and he too was caught and banned from living in the country for eight years. The shogunate could not ignore the two courageous farmers’ deeds and in 1673, the government relieved Kurahashi of his post and ordered the transfer to a smaller country.
The two episodes were not isolated developments during the Edo period, when the entire country was hit by recurring famines every several years. By historians’ counts, there were as many as 3,000 direct plea cases, in most of them, the leaders and their families were executed either on the cross or by beheading with the sword. Perhaps the most famous case was the 47 Samurai episode, though it was an appeal by a lower-ranked samurai domain lord to a higher-ranked one. On April 21, 1701, the Takumi Asano drew a dagger and injured Kozukenosuke Kira in the Edo Castle, a serious offense, and Asano was ordered to cut up his stomach and die, which he did immediately. The Shogunate considered the situation 24 hours for several days after Asano committed stomach-cutting death the same day. The government had to decide what to do about Asano’s domain and his samurai, and top officials who were bureaucrats – while not really consulting the shogun – agreed that the domain be disbanded and banning its samurai to serve the Asano clan. Next year’s December, the 47 samurai broke into Kira’s house in downtown Tokyo and beheaded him in revenge. The shogun government ordered all the 47 samurai commit seppuku, or disemboweling. The stern punishment was needed not only to maintain the samurai class order but also of farmers and merchants to demonstrate the shogunate’s authority over the entire country.
On October 14, 1686, Kasuke Tada, the peasant head, Zenbei Oana and Kasuke’s 16-year-old daughter Shun and seven others gathered around Matsumoto Castle and asked the magistrate office of domain lord Tadanao Mizuno, who was absent in Edo, to lower taxes. As they were supported by tens of hundreds of boisterous peasants, the magistrate office’s deputies agreed to accept the demand and handed a letter to the extent (sort of MOU) on Oct. 19. But the deputies wrote a letter to Mizuno that they would arrest the mutiny leaders and execute them. That they did: Eight of them, including Kasuke and Shun, were executed on the cross and 20 others were beheaded and their bodies cut into pieces.
Over the past few decades, the Japanese bureaucracy has been keeping a relatively low to modest profile, which partially may be traced to the bursting of the bubble economy in the early 1900s but more probably to bureaucrats’ incompetence to keep up with global trends and information technology revolution. Japanese bureaucrats continued to think themselves as the brightest class of the country but feigned humbleness not being sure how the country and world would transpire. As they were doing soul-searching, Shinzo Abe, who became to the prime minister in December 2012, emerged as the facilitator and guardian of the bureaucracy. Abe and his wife Akie were implicated in a couple of shady transactions over the opening of schools, one for a Shinto religion grade school and the other for a university veterinarian department of a separate school business group. Abe strongly denied his involvement and clearly told Ministry of Finance and other ministry bureaucrats to stonewall questions in parliament in 2017. The experience worked almost as a god-sent for them to field tough questions, and the mutual trust between the prime minister and the bureaucracy seems to have deepened, especially after Abe’s once close supporter/friend Yasunori Kagoike was arrested and dumped like a piece of trash.
Obviously, Abe and his deputy. Chief cabinet secretary Yshihide Suga are not the only officials that are engineering the bureaucracy transformation. Hiroto Izumi, who comes from the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport, is Abe’s head aide, and the second in command is Eiichi Hasegawa, from the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry. They are the ones that are making the bureaucracy at large feel comfortable about being bold in words and deeds. Over the past several years, they executed government administrative policies that give more work to bureaucrats while ignoring public outcries – tens of billions of dollars for building the wall – the seawalls along the northern Pacific coast of Japan against future tsunami and restart of nuclear power plants, both of them citizens say are unnecessary.
Toshio Aritake