Civil service of Japan

The Japanese civil service has over one million employees, with 400,000 workers in postal service, or Japan Post (since 2003), being the biggest part, whilst the Japan Self-Defence Forces being the second biggest, with 247,000 personnel. In the post-war period, this figure has been even higher, but the privatization of a large number of public corporations since the 1980s, among them NTT and Japanese National Railways, already reduced the number. Postal privatization is the next step. Still, the government as an employer is held in high regard. After the breakdown of the Japanese asset price bubble in the early 1990s, wages and privileges in the private sector were cut, but public service workers still enjoy many of the benefits introduced in the boom years.

National government civil servants are divided into "special" and "regular" categories. Appointments in the special category are governed by political or other factors and do not involve competitive examinations. This category includes cabinet ministers, heads of independent agencies, members of the Self-Defence Forces, Diet officials, and ambassadors. The core of the civil service is composed of members of the regular category, who are recruited through competitive examinations. This group is further divided into junior service and upper professional levels, the latter forming a well-defined civil service elite.

In trying to discover "who's in charge here," many Japan analysts have pointed to the elite bureaucracy as the people who really govern Japan, although they composed only a tiny fraction of the country's more than 1 million national government employees. Several hundred of the elite are employed at each national ministry or agency. Although entry into the elite through open examinations does not require a college degree, the majority of its members are alumni of Japan's most prestigious universities. The University of Tokyo law faculty is the single most important source of elite bureaucrats. After graduation from college and, increasingly, some graduate-level study, applicants take a series of difficult higher civil service examinations: in 2009, for example, 22,186 took the tests of higher (the 1st grade) civil service, but only 1,494, or 6.7 percent, were successful. Of those who were successful, only 660 were actually hired. Like the scholar-officials of imperial China, successful candidates were hardy survivors of a grueling education and testing process that necessarily began in early childhood and demanded total concentration. The typical young bureaucrat, who is in most cases male, is an intelligent, hardworking, and dedicated individual. But some bureaucrats, critics argue, lack imagination and compassion for people whose way of life is different from their own. Recently, many top-class candidates in universities prefer to choose financial companies or certificate of lawyers and accountants rather than civil services, however. This is because salary in civil services is lower especially when they are young, and civil services undergo significant criticism and reforms these days.

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