The Japan That Can't Reform

[Mulboyne]

[floatl][/floatl]"Why Japan Can't Reform: Inside the System" by Susan Carpenter

"At the start of the 1990s Japan's post war economic success came to an abrupt end, and the country slid into a decade long recession from which it has, on many levels, still not recovered. This book examines the institutional factors in the Japanese system of government administration that have paralyzed the decision-making process and prevented the system from accommodating the ever changing demands on the domestic front and the global political economy. It argues that the current model defies structural reform and frustrates the implementation of economic and social policies that can resolve the problems that have challenged the Japanese for years."

You can read a sample chapter here (PDF). Carpenter will also be giving a presentation next month in London at the Daiwa Anglo-Japanese Foundation

[sublight]

Another good book on the subject is Dr. Masao Miyamoto's 1994 Straitjacket Society: An Insider's Irreverent View of Bureaucratic Japan

http://www.amazon.com/Straitjacket-Society-Insiders-Irreverent-Bureaucratic/dp/4770018487/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1225265818&sr=8-1

From Publishers Weekly
Miyamoto, a Tokyo-born psychiatrist who spent 10 years in the U.S. as a postdoctoral student at Yale and as a Cornell Medical College professor, returned to Japan in 1986 to join the Ministry of Health and Welfare. His years in the West ill-prepared him to accept Japanese group-think, which he perceives as an adolescent syndrome and a form of institutionalized masochism. He refused to sacrifice his personal life to it; chafed against the officially sanctioned gold-bricking that constituted much of his job; argued with his supervisors; and became isolated from his peers. Far worse, he shocked the bureaucracy by publicly criticizing it in articles and in this book, which was published in Japan this past September and became a bestseller. While Western observers have made similar criticisms of Japanese society, none have offered the same insider's detail and credentials. Miyamoto's account of his absurd experiences is streaked with outrage, but his descriptions of how laws are written, how budgets are made, how careers proceed and how workers behave contribute valuable social and psychological insights into Japanese society.

[TFG]

Why Japan can't reform?
The answer to that is the LDP ruling for way to long.