Amakudari: The Hidden Fabric of Japan's Economy (review)

The phenomenon of amakudari has been dealt with in numerous scholarly works on Japan in a variety of social science disciplines, but the volume that Richard A. Colignon and Chikako Usui coauthored is the first book-length study exclusively dedicated to the subject. Neither their approach nor their data can be said to be particularly original, but the book, by putting together different data sources, presents a useful, bird's-eye view of the extensive practice and serves as a good introduction to the topic, especially for those to whom the sheer scope of amakudari in Japanese society would be news.

Amakudari literally means "descent from heaven" and, in Japan, the term commonly refers to the postretirement employment of bureaucrats in private and public corporations, particularly those under their ministry's jurisdiction. This word, however, is used more elastically by Colignon and Usui, who applied the concept in a broad sense even to bureaucrats seeking elective office. Furthermore, following Chalmers Johnson, they also use the word amakudari in a narrow sense to refer to reemployment in private corporations, while they call personnel moves to public corporations yokosuberi ("lateral move").¹ In abstract terms, they define amakudari as "personnel retirement paths linking the central bureaucracy to its wider environment, identifying the domain of operation for the ministry of origin, establishing the boundaries of its territory, and attempting to secure its own legitimacy" (p.29).

The mismatch between the "local" conceptualization of amakudari and the authors' somewhat creative use of the italicized term is confusing. As far as this reviewer knows, the use of the term yokosuberi to designate bureaucrats' move to public corporations upon retirement is also Johnson's invention that has no indigenous roots. If the authors do not try to be faithful to the local conceptualization of the issue and impose their own categories instead, why do they use the italicized Japanese terms? The lack of conceptual clarity has serious consequences because it muddles the objective of their research. Are Colignon and Usui trying to understand why so many bureaucrats retire to jobs in public and private corporations, and thereby reveal "the hidden fabric of Japan's economy" (as the subtitle of the book suggests)? Or, does their research aim at locating the position of the bureaucracy in the power structure of Japan by tracing as much of the postretirement movements of central bureaucrats to surrounding institutions as possible? If it was the former, the authors' reliance on compiled quantitative data does not compensate for the corresponding loss in depth in insight that more focused, industry- or ministry-specific studies would provide, whereas if it was the latter, then the apparent comprehensiveness of their coverage nevertheless leaves important holes uncovered, especially in relation to the political world.

Colignon and Usui draw more or less exclusively on aggregate data in the substantive chapters that respectively deal with what they call amakudari (in their narrow sense), yokosuberi, and wataridori (successive postretirement reemployment in two or more corporations, sometimes across public and private sectors). Note that these three "categories" together form what is usually conceived of as amakudari in Japan. Put simply, the main interest of the authors here lies in providing as full an account of the overall number of amakudari as possible, cross-ministry breakdowns and rankings, and (to a lesser extent) distribution by types and characteristics of recipient institutions. In other words, some data illustrate the distribution and trends of amakudari from the side of the ministries, while others offer information from the side of the private or public corporations that receive retired officials. A major shortcoming of such an approach that depends more or less exclusively on aggregate data on either side of amakudari is that the two sides are never matched in a way that enables us to understand which ministry sends how many and what kind of officials to which kind of corporations at what level, and, most important, why...