Doing Fieldwork in Japan

Research among the Bureaucrats: Substance and Process

For some thirty years now I have been trying to study various issues of public policy in Japan. Although unfortunately policy studies are not very trendy in the general field of political science at the moment, they have been popular among Japan specialists for a long time and are still seen as mainstream. While some who do policy studies emphasize a structural approach (particularly in political economy) and others mostly employ a “unitary rational actor” model (particularly to analyze foreign policy), people like me try to relate aspects of political process (what bureaucracies, parties, or interest groups actually do) to the substance of policy (what governments do, why they implement one kind of policy—good or bad—rather than another). Any of these approaches to public policy can be substantially enriched by comparing Japan with other countries. Policy research is often on rather contemporary subjects and must be carried out in and around the bureaucracy. Techniques like interviewing and gathering government publications and other kinds of (often fragmentary) j o h n c r e i g h t o n c a m p b e l l Research among the Bureaucrats: Substance and Process John Creighton Campbell singing karaoke (“My Funny Valentine”) during a night out with bureaucrats. documentary evidence are particularly important to policy researchers, though scholars in other fields not infrequently need them too. Some problems , such as finding a mentor and just plain getting started, are probably common to all kinds of field research in Japan but can have a bit of a policy nuance. Of course, for every project, one has to pick a topic, which is a good place to begin this account. What Did I Work on—and Why? My dissertation and first book was on budget making (Campbell 1977). That was by its nature almost entirely a process study, with policy substance treated only as a few tiny case studies and a brief discussion of fiscal policy. It was comparative mainly in the sense that it was patterned on a famous study of budget making in America by Aaron Wildavsky (1964). Doing a “replication” study was a good idea for my dissertation, especially since it turned out that Japanese budgeting was better described by Wildavsky’s “incrementalist” model than was American budgeting. My second book, many years later, was half about process (using a fairly elaborate model of “policy change” I developed myself) and half description and analysis of virtually all the röjin taisaku (policies for the elderly) initiated from the mid-1950s until 1990 (Campbell 1992). Other than a discussion of how the development of the welfare state in Japan differed from other countries , it was not very comparative. Given that the research and writing used up fifteen years and 418 pages, actual comparative research would only have been possible at the expense of much of what I hoped to do about Japanese process and policy. My third book, coauthored with Naoki Ikegami, was an attempt to figure out how the Japanese medical-care system works (Campbell and Ikegami 1998). Although little space was given to historical narrative, we described the biennial decision-making process for price setting in detail, and one of our basic arguments was the importance of maintaining “balance” among the powerful interests in this field. The book included many comparisons with the United States, even though European systems are more similar and would have been more logical to use, because we wanted the book to be understandable to American readers. My current project looks to be half-and-half on process and policy. I am working on Kaigo Hoken, the new mandatory public, long-term-care insurance system that started on April 1, 2000 (Campbell 2000). The question of 230 | j o h n c r e i g h t o n c a m p b e l l what to do about care for frail, elderly people is becoming a key policy issue in many industrialized nations, and I am trying to figure out whether and how the various policy choices made in Japan make sense, to some extent in comparison with Germany, Scandinavia, and Israel (I made brief research visits for that purpose). I also want to trace the rather convoluted process of decision making among bureaucrats, politicians, formal and informal interest groups, and local governments, all the way from the idea’s early glimmerings around 1990 through, I...