TOKYO, Oct. 12, 2020—Becoming a Japanese government employee once was the most-coveted career path for students. It guaranteed job and income security for life plus a post-retirement post at government-managed public entity and later at a business. New grads might not think so now. The 2019 annual report released by the National Personal Agency showed a significant drop in the number of applicants, including those for so-called career jobs at the Ministry of Finance and the Foreign Ministry.
Aggregate applicants numbered 124,666 in 2019, shrinking 4.6 percent from 2018, according to the report released on June 5, 2020. The number was a steep dive from the 1995 peak of 330,686. Applicants hit a record low of 110,043 in the global financial crisis year of 2008 and rebounded to 155,231 in 2012. Since then, it has been hovering around 135,000.
The 2019 data showed that the number of applicants seeking so-called career posts – the jobs for making national policies and programs — shrank 11.0 percent from 2018.
Over the past several years under former prime minister Shinzo Abe’s administration, a succession of scandals erupted, most notably, the Moritomo and Kakei scandals that surfaced in 2017. Neither scandal was of the Donald Trump size but was sufficient to attract Japanese media attention to Abe’s alleged close ties with the figures implicated, one of them arrested and charged for larceny
In both cases, career bureaucrats were allegedly actively involved working closely with and for Abe: Nobuhisa Sagawa, director-general of the Ministry of Finance’s Treasury Bureau, and other senior government officials. Sagawa resigned his post in 2018, and to this day, he is believed to have not taken up the next job.
If acting like a commander and issuing orders to career bureaucrats is Abe’s administrative style, Sagawa and other bureaucrats had failed to challenge the prime minister and demonstrate the Japanese bureaucracy’s neutrality and independence in government administration as their predecessors once managed to do to gain foreign acclaim – with pride and arrogance of samurai descendants.
It then was no surprise that petty crimes and scandals involving bureaucrats have been splashing media front pages almost every week since then: Hiromu Kurokawa, the Prosecutor-general, playing a game of mahjong betting money with Asahi Shimbun newspaper editors in April and May 2020, and education ministry officials that had influenced the university entry exam of sons of business executives, among the countless.
This may be one of the reasons why fewer Japanese students, particularly male, apply to become bureaucrats, but there are many more reasons. We’ll learn the reality over the coming few years. In the meantime, young and bright students are heading for Goldman Sachs, other foreign banks, Accenture, and other foreign businesses.
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