Asia Times: NIPPON: Descent from Heaven


	March 30, 2000	atimes.com

Japan

NIPPON: Descent from Heaven
By Bradley Martin

They're raising the retirement age to 65 in Japan, but it's a good bet that won't stop the country's civil servants from using their clout to arrange cushy post-retirement sinecures.

A reminder of how deeply rooted is this practice of amakudari, or descent from heaven, came in an article on gambling in Monday's Daily Yomiuri. Writer Naoki Inose presented a catalogue of positions both inside the pachinko industy and overseeing it that are held by retired high-ranking police officers.

The Japanese version of pinball and the country's number one vehicle for gambling, pachinko falls under the regulatory purview of the National Police Agency. And looking at a list of high-ranking executives in pachinko-related organizations, wrote Inose, is ''like browsing an album of former police chiefs''. Some of the highest ranking:

* A former chief of the Kinki Regional Police Bureau is chairman of Nippon Leisure Game Card-System Co while a former chief of the Kanto Regional Police Bureau chairs its competitor, Nihon Game Card Co;

* A former chief of the Tohoku Regional Police Bureau is managing director of the Security, Electronics and Communications Technology Association, which exercises the power to approve or disapprove newly manufactured pachinko machines for shipment;

* Former chiefs of the Kyushu Regional Police Bureau hold the managing directorships at both of the pachinko business associations, which between them control all the country's pachinko parlors.

Amakudari in recent decades has become less and less a casual matter of officials approaching retirement and looking around for friendly organizations that will give them second careers. It is systematized now.

The personnel units of various ministries and other government agencies actively work, backed with their organizations' powers of regulating industries, to encourage the development of new organizations that can provide post-retirement jobs for their top people. These are often ''public-private'' organizations able to tap into taxpayers' money.

The personnel managers handle the rotation in and out - with those retirees who rotate out of amakudari posts sometimes moving straight into their second or third amakudari assignments.

Analysts of the enormously expensive, wasteful and corrupting practice often have pointed the finger at the country's low retirement age, which in public and private organizations has tended in recent decades to range from 55 to 60. There's a move afoot to raise it to 65, but that won't necessarily eliminate or even reduce very much the amakudari phenomenon.

One reason why the practice seems likely to continue is the traditional East Asian (read Confucian) notion that it's not seemly for officials to have to work for other officials who are younger than they. When a group of officials in one age cohort is moving into the top ranks in the organization, officials who hold less senior positions are expected to move on, taking early retirement if they have not yet reached the maximum retirement age.

And then there's the inescapable fact that holding a high-paying job, complete with perks such as a car and driver and sometimes an expense account for wining and dining in Ginza hostess bars, strikes most Japanese salary men as far more attractive than retiring - whether to travel with wives they haven't seen much during their working years or just to sit uselessly around the house and earn the contemptuous designation sodai gomi, or outsized trash.

Even if the country changes the retirement age to 70, we can predict that officials reaching retirement age will be scrambling for such plum posts as member of the National Public Safety Commission.

The NPSC is supposed to oversee the police force and keep it straight, but the Japanese public was irritated to learn recently that the five commission members need do nothing for their 1,346,000 yen monthly salaries besides attend a weekly, two-hour meeting. That leaves plenty of time both for golf and for other, add-on sinecures - membership on corporate boards of directors, for example.

(Special to Asia Times Online)

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