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(C) SCMP
Monday March 30 1998
Psychiatrist discovers a nation hurt by uniformity
BENJAMIN FULFORD
Within the space of a few years, Japan's bureaucrats have been transformed from figures of awe and respect to objects of distrust and ridicule. Apart from the bunglings of the bureaucrats themselves, the main impetus behind this 180-degree change in outlook has been Masao Miyamoto, author of the book, 'A Straight Jacket Society'.
The book, written while he was working for the Ministry of Health and Welfare, became a best-seller for the amusing way he described the bureaucracy's feudal ways. It infuriated his bosses so much that they specially created the office of Kobe Quarantine Officer in order to quarantine him from the rest of the ministry.
They finally fired him for describing the comedy of bureaucratic errors that compounded the tragedy of the Kobe earthquake of 1995.
This bitter split in many ways symbolises the problems Japan has in dealing with its own internationalised citizens. On the one hand, it knows they are desperately needed in this global age and yet, on the other hand, Japan's rigid public and corporate bureaucracies often do not know how to deal with them.
Mr Miyamoto comes from a Tokyo family of 14 generations of medical doctors. He got his medical degree at Nihon University in 1973 before going to the US to do post-graduate work in psychiatry and psychoanalysis. He became an assistant professor of psychiatry at Cornell Medical College in 1980 before accepting a similar post at New York Medical College in 1984. In 1986, he made the fateful decision to return to Japan to take up a career at the Ministry of Health and Welfare.
"I never expected I would become one of the key figures to point out the problems of Japanese bureaucracy and Japanese society, because when I came back it was to look after my mother and grandmother," he said.
Because of his background, Mr Miyamoto was allowed to start his career at the unusually late age of 37 as deputy director of the mental health division.
However, whatever illusions Mr Miyamoto may have had about transforming mental health policy in Japan were soon shattered by the bureaucratic realities he encountered.
"Being in the ministry was like going back to elementary school. I was shocked. I had far more culture shock being back in Japan being Japanese at age 37 than when I went to US in my 20s," Mr Miyamoto said.
"What amazed me was people were nosy. They were telling me what kind of tie to wear, how many creases my pants should have, the colour my shirts should be, etcetera. In the US, nobody made that kind of comment," he said.
Mr Miyamoto, dressed in a purple designer jacket and a pink cashmere sweater for the interview, would definitely have stood out like a neon light in the bureaucratic hallways where even wearing something other than grey or dark blue is considered to be risque. When he refused to change his dress code his colleagues resorted to bullying and petty harassment.
Most disturbing of all was the level of mediocrity he found. "In top US universities, all people who go up the ladder to posts like dean, chairman, professor, etcetera. become brighter, more decisive and insightful; they become like geniuses. I expected the same at [the] ministry but some of the ministry director generals were dumb, not dumb dumb, but just average men," he noted.
"I was also amazed at how inefficient it was. They had endless conferences that had no end result. And people stayed in the office until 11pm or midnight. At Cornell, by 4:30pm everybody is gone."
Before long, Mr Miyamoto began to discern what he calls the three rules of the bureaucracy: exhaustion, inefficiency and ignorance. Government employees were working themselves to exhaustion, carrying out their duties in an inefficient manner and hiding any talent they may have had, he said.
Mr Miyamoto came across the exhaustion rule when he saw employees were given praise for being on the job on Sundays, suffering sleep deprivation by staying late and arriving early regardless of how much work was actually accomplished. He himself was reprimanded for trying to leave at 7pm even though he had finished all the work required of him. The ideal he observed was the complete sacrifice of all personal time for work. "You cannot have your own personal life," he said. He described with great pity "all the men in their 20s who never had time to go on dates".
Coupled with this culture of spending long hours at work, there was an amazing level of inefficiency. Apart from the "endless, useless conferences", hours were spent watching television, drinking beer, reading comics and sleeping on sofas, he said.
More damaging still, was the glacially slow nemawashi, or consensus building, "the process of having agreement from everybody". "The most symbolic inefficiency" he added, "is that women cannot go up the ladder and are kept below men. That is really inefficient because if somebody is bright why not use that person."
The rule of ignorance came from what he described as a process of "intellectual communisation". He said the bureaucracy perpetuated this "communisation" with a process of "psychological castration" in high school designed to break the will of students.
"The Japanese educational system discourages creativity and originality. People who are ordinary are given the power to pull down those who have more ability than others," he said. "By the time he reaches 18, the Japanese child has become a perfect sheep."
He added that in the bureaucracy, the rule seemed to be "everybody should do the same job no matter what talent they have". Mr Miyamoto emphasised that "many Japanese are bright and know a lot but they are not supposed to show it or be brilliant in conversation.
"Furthermore, in the bureaucracy, you are exhausted and you cannot have time for yourself," he said. "What it means is that in your mind everything stays status quo. It is difficult to change because nothing is coming into you."
The Japanese tried to avoid confrontation at all costs, he said, noting that this stymies the type of stimulating intellectual conversation that lies behind so much of the world's creativity.
"China is changing faster than Japan because the Chinese are comfortable with confrontation," he said.
A watershed event in his eventual absolute alienation from the bureaucracy was his quest to take a two-week holiday. Although in theory it was his right to take a long holiday, in reality few ever took more than three consecutive days off.
Although he wanted to go on a gourmet tour of Italy and France with his American girlfriend, he knew such a plan would be rejected out of hand. In the end, after countless days of wrangling with his superiors he managed to convince them he needed an unprecedented two weeks holiday in order to take his dying mother on a final tour to visit relatives in different parts of Japan.
After describing his holiday saga to a friend who worked for the Asahi Shimbun newspaper he was asked to write an article about it. "To my surprise, this article - talking about how difficult it is to take time off - got lots of attention."
"As a courtesy, I showed a draft of the article to my superiors. They were very upset that I wrote this and tried to have the printing stopped," Mr Miyamoto said.
"I realised writing this article had to do with freedom of expression and individual rights, so I wrote about how angry my superiors got about my article. That was again a hit for the paper so they asked me to write a series. I put the articles together into a book and also added how making subservience a virtue was a problem for Japan. The book sold 440,000 copies and has now been translated into English, French, German and Spanish."
After it was published, and even as his superiors sent him to career purgatory in the quarantine office, he became a celebrity because the book struck a deep chord throughout Japanese society, where holidays are routinely turned down and unpaid overtime is the norm.
Mr Miyamoto also became the darling of the foreign press and diplomatic circuit. Perhaps what infuriated his superiors and delighted foreign trade negotiators the most was the translations he gave for Japanese bureaucrat speak.
For example, he said, "If a bureaucrat says 'we will respectfully listen to your opinion, thoroughly investigate the matter and follow the developments closely', he means 'we will do nothing'."
The final straw for his superiors was a press conference he held in Washington, DC.
There, he told an influential group of reporters and politicians that "Japanese society is only wearing a mask with the features of democracy and free competition".
"In reality," he said, "the politicians are not allowed to be more than puppets because the bureaucrats monopolise the power to write the laws."
"Furthermore, individuals have to sacrifice their lives for the sake of the group."
"After I was fired [in 1995 after nine years as a bureaucrat] I got invited to give lectures around the world; Harvard, Oxford, etcetera, but no single Japanese university has invited me to give a talk."
Mr Miyamoto said he was still being harassed by the Japanese bureaucracy.
He attributes Japan's stagnation of the past eight years to the fact that bureaucratic rule was good for catching up but cannot bring a country to a leadership role.
"In a way, Japan is the last communist state but it was run so loosely that its problems came out last. The problems of the system are coming out in the form of economic failure," he said.
Despite the impact his book has had, and despite recent arrests of many bureaucrats by the Tokyo prosecutors office, Mr Miyamoto says he is not optimistic about Japan's prospects for reform.
"The crackdown is a power struggle between the prosecutors and the Ministry of Finance but it will not lead to change in the sense of freedom, individualism and independence. This kind of philosophy is something bureaucracy is trying to shut out of Japan."
His greatest fear is a resurgence of nationalism. "Nationalism is a good way to deal with freedom. The freedom of the Weimar constitution was an obstacle for nazis and nationalism was their tool to get around it. Japan could take a similar path, which it does not have to, but people can be manipulated," he warned.
Mr Miyamoto said he planned to leave Japan with his live-in girlfriend of the past 15 years and take up a job as a university lecturer overseas. "I would like to teach about Japan and not just exotic things like Geisha," he said. "I would like to focus on interpersonal relations."
"Japan will continue to be an economic power and people will have to deal with the Japanese, so if you know how Japanese mentality works beforehand you will know how to do business."
Masao Miyamoto gained worldwide fame in the early 1990s after publishing a series of articles satirising Japanese bureaucracy. Mr Miyamoto received a medical degree at Nihon University in 1973 before moving to the US to do post-graduate work in psychiatry and psychoanalysis. In 1986, he returned to Japan to take up a career at the Ministry of Health and Welfare. The 50-year old Mr Miyamoto lives in Tokyo. |
