Today is Showa Day

Showa no Hi (昭和の日). This Japanese national holiday marks the start of the Golden Week holiday period. It was established in 2007 as a day to reflect on the events of the Shōwa period (1926 to 1989). When I was in Japan (1986 to 1992), April 29 was the birthday of the Emperor Hirohito, officially known as Emperor Shōwa. When the Emperor passed away in 1989, the date was observed as Greenery Day. To mark that eventful period in Japanese history, let’s read a non-fiction book about Japan.

The Straitjacket Society: An Insider's Irreverent View of Bureaucratic Japan - Masao Miyamoto

Miyamoto, a psychiatrist, studied in the US for 11 years. He spent three years of postdoc work in psychiatry and psychoanalysis before accepting a position as an assistant professor of psychiatry at Cornell. In 1984, he became an assistant professor at New York Medical College. He had to return to Japan for family reasons.

He was hired by the Japanese Ministry of Health and Welfare for his technical knowledge and abilities. A typical kikokushijo (帰国子女 literally “returnee children”) - Japanese returning to Japan after a long stay abroad for work or study - he ran into trouble. For one, he was a smart guy with a subversive sense of humor. For another, he was a doctor, member of a group not known for their modesty or ability to suffer fools. Lastly, to me, he seemed rather naive about re-entry shock. Did he really think those loosely educated and rigid bureaucrats who'd never lived outside Japan long would be tolerant of his meiwaku (causing everybody trouble)?

Bosses and colleagues bullied and upbraided him but in meetings he wasn't shy about telling them he found their reasoning wanting. He was used to the adversarial give and take in US academic and professional settings (i.e. bicker pits) where defending conclusions and positions – with and without logic - generates ideas and knowledge. What deeply stung the officials he worked for was that he wrote candid essays about bureaucracy for the leftish monthly Gekkan Asahi. Both as a chronicle of his re-entry shock and castigation of bureaucrats (a popular sport in Japan), these articles were such a hit that they were collected in a book The Straitjacket Society: An Insider's Irreverent View of Bureaucratic Japan (1994). The book is hilarious and, to bureaucrats like me that detest red tape, disheartening.

The beginning skillfully combines background information and his experience. He relates his surprise at a weekend excursion with his co-workers. The hot spring wasn't even a real one but had piped-in hot water. The food was awful. He found dull the drinking to get shitfaced and porno parties. Sick of it all, he announced that he was going back to Tokyo on the 10:00 AM train. No fewer than five colleagues who wanted to escape too volunteered to go with him, saying that it's not right to have to travel alone.

He uses the example of compelled togetherness to discuss the orientation of messhihoko (滅私奉公). Though it looks like an ancient four-character compound that would grace a kakemono scroll, it is but a wartime slogan the powers that be wanted the Japanese to bear in mind and behave accordingly. Messhihoko literally means “extinguish the self, serve the lord” and urges people to sacrifice themselves for the goals of the group. Miyamoto says that this message is so deeply drummed into people that even if they feel stressed, exhausted, or angry, they will resign themselves to the inevitable situation and, more importantly, not complain while doing as they are directed.

This book is not all psychological and cultural explanation. He also provides more nitty-gritty reasons why the Japanese bureaucracy is on auto-pilot. This is only one of many funny-sad conversations he has with superiors:

Miyamoto: You mean that once something is provided for in a budget you can't stop doing it? Why not?

Health ministry official: In the government offices, as long as a certain amount of money has been budgeted for a certain purpose, it has to be used up.

Surely it wouldn't matter if there was a little bit left over.

It's not that easy. Returning unused money is taboo.

Why is that?

Leftover money gives the Finance Ministry the impression that the project in question is not very important, which makes it a target of budget cuts the following year. The loss of even a single project means a smaller budget for the whole department. The director is going to take a dim view of that, since it affects his career prospects.

Full disclosure: I was the beneficiary of the custom “spend it or lose it” when I was an employee of the Ministry of Education. Near the end of the fiscal year, I would get calls from the administrators in my dean's office. They'd urge me to attend any meetings related to English education being held on mainland Japan as they would like to make resources available to me in the event that I thought it would be helpful to my professional development to attend conferences or conventions in Tokyo or Osaka or Kyoto in February and March. What a wonderful job that was.

The Japanese, weary of regulations besides skeptical of the competence of arrogant bureaucrats, avidly read Miyamoto's weekly magazine articles. They admired Miyamoto for telling the truth. But the government expressed their displeasure by assigning him to jobs with less and less responsibility and exiling him farther and farther away from Tokyo.

In April 1993 the articles were collected under the title Oyakusho no Okite (お役所の掟 Code of the Bureaucrats - a satirical reminder of the medieval guide of the same name) and became a bestseller. His bosses were angry and vindictive. Miyamoto was finally canned on the bogus ground that he was AWOL. He then made a living as a critic of the system until his untimely death. Masao Miyamoto, at the age of only 51, died of cancer at a hospital near Paris in 1999.