ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the strong, and historic, influence that the Japanese bureaucracy has had on Japanese politics over the decades since the end of the Asian Pacific wars, an idea that has come to be known as the “developmental state.” In part the “catch-up modernization” mentality that Japan has nurtured since the 1868 Meiji Restoration is responsible for Japan’s adoption of a system that relies on heavy top-down “guidance.” The Japanese bureaucracy, political world, and business community have cemented an inter-supporting triangular relationship, one of the more controversial being the amakudari (descent from heaven) that provides bureaucrats with a post-retirement second career in the industry in which they specialized while in the bureaucracy.
