There has never been a time when Japanese society has paid greater attention to government records management than today.
Such a record-keeping system requires the central government to preserve and manage public documents as historical materials in chronological order to be eventually disclosed to the public. In postwar Japan, such infrastructure was not put in place until the 21st century. When did our country begin to ignore this very fundamental element of politics and government?
I remember the early days of the National Archives of Japan in Tokyo. Shortly after its establishment in 1971, I began visiting the Chiyoda Ward facility frequently to learn the truth about political events in the Meiji era (1868-1912). I combed through a pile of government records of the era, which were labeled with simple bibliographic classifications. These included "Dajo Ruiten" (records of the Grand Council of State, the highest organ of the government in the early Meiji era, or up to 1881), "Kobunroku" (public records of the Meiji government from 1868 to 1885, from which "Dajo Ruiten" was compiled) and "Kobun Ruishu" (collections of similar records, which superseded "Dajo Ruiten" in 1882).
At the time, I was working on my first academic book, "Meiji Kokka Keisei to Chiho Keiei" (The formation of the Meiji state and regional management) (University of Tokyo Press, 1980). The collections of records allowed me to fully utilize for the book detailed Meiji-era data pertaining to civil engineering budgets and letters exchanged between ministries concerning state subsidies. I was continuously excited, and often beside myself with joy, as I was able to get really close to historical facts dating back to that era.
The National Archives of Japan kept me elated further as I then began looking into public records from 1912 -- the first year of the Taisho era -- and the early years of the following Showa era, which began in 1926. I discovered a trove of records on administrative management and related materials from the cabinets formed by the Friends of Constitutional Government Party (Seiyukai), or by the Constitutional Democratic Party (Minseito). I wrote an academic article on the basis of the documents.
'Collapse of history'
But the circumstances surrounding public records for the years after the end of World War II were completely different. The environment for public records was in chaos due to Japan's defeat in the war and the ensuing occupation by the Allied Powers.
In fact, as Japan surrendered on Aug. 15, 1945, public records across Japan came under an unprecedented storm of confusion. Stacks of public documents that would have been indispensable to clarifying the process leading to "the collapse of the state" were taken out of the archives and destroyed. The Finance Ministry, the War Ministry, the Home Affairs Ministry and other key ministries were terrified by the possibility that such records would be confiscated by the Occupation forces and thought that they must do their utmost to prevent this. They behaved like mice burrowing into the walls while the cat -- the Allied troops -- was not yet ashore in Japan. They made every effort to burn all of the documents that might be used to identify those who were responsible for the war.
Sharing a clear understanding that they must leave no evidence, wartime government officials, responsible for "the collapse of the state," caused Japan to suffer "the collapse of history," too. Those in the government and the military who had until just a few days earlier carried out their political and administrative duties with confidence chose to completely eliminate both memories and records of their activities out of fear of being rounded up as war criminals. Takeo Fukuda and Kiichi Miyazawa, both of whom were Finance Ministry bureaucrats in 1945 and later held the post of prime minister, said they vividly recalled the smoke that kept rising from the premises of various ministries in Kasumigaseki, including their ministry, day after day.
Thus, the Japanese bureaucracy's tendency to cover up wrongdoing and mistakes to the detriment of keeping public records originally emerged in August 1945. What is worse, postwar Japanese officialdom, which obeyed the General Headquarters of the Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers, established a new habit of leaving as little evidence as possible instead of taking the risk of being forced to hide evidence. Officials tended to refrain as much as possible from record-keeping, discarding the tradition of keeping thorough and detailed public records.
Even after Japan formally regained independence in April 1952, following the signing of the San Francisco Peace Treaty in September 1951, the good tradition did not revive. After years of postwar reconstruction, the Japanese economy fortunately entered a high-growth phase, making it possible for politicians and bureaucrats to think of what to do "now" with little fear of being held accountable for past mistakes. All they were expected to do was to keep moving forward as quickly as possible with new policies while sparing no time to stop and think twice. Such an extraordinary economic boom was now going on.
Japan then saw one network of elite bureaucrats after another come into being, helping accelerate the high-growth trend. Those networks were a legacy of the prewar social hierarchy based on alumni associations of senior high schools under the old education system. Postwar bureaucrats who graduated from those schools were known to engage in cronyism based on when many of them used to live together in school dormitories.
For instance, Hayato Ikeda and Eisaku Sato, who were among postwar Prime Minister Shigeru Yoshida's favorite political disciples and who eventually held the office of prime minister themselves, graduated from the prewar Fifth High School (Goko), which was the precursor of Kumamoto University. As Goko ceased to exist in 1950 and no longer had new graduates, members of its alumni association became closer to one another as time went by. Their association had its own memorial hall, publishing membership newsletters. They were often referred to as the "Goko clique."
Clique politics
Ikeda was prime minister for four years from 1960 and was succeeded in 1964 by Sato, who was at the helm of the government for eight years till 1972. As the two members of the Goko clique stayed in power for a total of 12 years, such a relationship became a norm in administrative management. In Japan, people who are close enough to each other are often considered intimate friends, as in the case of alumni of the same school, who used to "eat rice cooked in the same kettle." Those friends are supposed to tacitly understand each other. When there is such fundamentally close friendship, the bureaucrats concerned tend to work as efficiently as possible for the relevant government chief.
As the Japanese economy kept growing from the 1960s to the 1980s, the bureaucracy continued functioning at full strength, always thinking about what was to be done "now." Nobody cast doubt on the efficiency, advisability or infallibility of such an environment surrounding bureaucrats. In his 1979 book, "Japan as Number One," Ezra Vogel admired the Japanese bureaucracy for being preeminent in the world. I also remember that even a political science textbook published at that time said audaciously, "From time to time, some people point out certain mistakes on the part of the government, but, in most cases, such arguments turn out to be their misunderstanding."
In those days, it was plausibly said that the first thing a new division chief in a ministry was supposed to do was to dispose of all documents left in a cardboard box by his predecessor. New policies to be pursued should be put in a new bag, as it were. The new chief would not look at the documents left by the predecessor as there was no need to do so. Indeed, there seemed to be an atmosphere of always rushing forward, with never a backward glance.
I heard that in the world of bureaucrats, individual attributes did not matter and that it was a world of stealth officials, meaning that whoever was appointed administrative vice minister or director general of a bureau or director of a division, there would be no difference in their achievements. If one presumes the importance of the network of senior high school alumni, such an explanation may sound convincing.
Oral history recording
Due to the postwar shift of bureaucrats' attitudes toward public records, I, as a researcher of modern history, have continued to find none of them relevant to almost any given theme. So, in the late 1980s, I began preparations for launching an oral history recording series with a view to rectifying the shortage of written public records as much as possible.
The start of my new research project happened to coincide with the end of the high-growth period and the retirement of the generation of people utilizing their respective networks of senior high school alumni. Indeed, it seemed the end of the Showa era in 1989 might also mean the end of the tendency among bureaucrats to only go after things that might be good for "now."
Now we live in the Heisei era, with the country's bureaucracy having slowly weakened. During the 30-year-period to date, Japan experienced a property and stock market bubble from 1986 to 1991 -- the third year of the Heisei era -- and a series of scandalous incidents. The scandals and the bursting of the bubble both symbolize the decline of the bureaucracy.
In 2001 (Heisei 13), the government revamped and streamlined the country's ministries and agencies, but the structural defects of the bureaucracy seemed to remain incurable. Yet, as the environment in which bureaucrats found it comfortable to deal with things that mattered "now" no longer exists, people are finally taking the time to look back at the past and think about the future.
The Heisei era's "transformation of the state" was also effective in having public records play an important role in helping people bring back memories of the past. In 2009 when the Public Records and Archives Management Law was enacted, the National Archives of Japan, founded in 1971, became capable of fully functioning to collect postwar and recent past records rather than those of the more distant past. Meanwhile, as I served as the first chair of the Cabinet Office's Public Records and Archives Management Commission from 2010 to 2014, I was astonished to learn the mind-set common to bureaucrats extended even to discarding records about the Great East Japan Earthquake of 2011.
Japan has begun dealing seriously with public records management under the pressure of necessity. There are many problems to cope with simultaneously, such as archiving huge volumes of records, enhancing electronic and digitalized records, storing public records as historical materials and indexing public records.
While Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has been in power for a long time, his administration remains indecisive about ensuring public records management. Such a stance has been increasingly exacerbated by specific cases of inadequate public records management, reflecting the entrenched behavioral pattern that bureaucrats of the Heisei era have continued.
As public records management stands now, I think Japan must turn the new era that is to follow the Heisei era into an epoch-making opportunity to usher in a major revolution in the field of public records management. How should public records written in monotonous and prosaic style be better utilized for the well-being of the Japanese population? How should we make public records intriguing to the general public? In this respect, the Japanese people as a whole also need to change their approach to public records in a way to feel closer to them.
-- Mikuriya is a professor emeritus at the University of Tokyo specializing in Japanese political history and a visiting professor at the Research Center for Advanced Science and Technology of the University of Tokyo. He is Japan's leading authority in oral history. He served as acting chair of the Advisory Council on Easing the Burden of the Official Duties and Public Activities of His Majesty the Emperor, which submitted a final report to the prime minister in April 2017.
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