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Bureaucratic Development And Bureaucratization: The Case of Japan

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 January 2016

Bernard S. Silberman
Bernard S. Silberman*
Affiliation:
Department of Political Science, The University of Chicago
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Extract

One of the aspects of Japanese political development most puzzling to historians and political scientists is the seemingly rapid pendulum change from bureaucratic oligarchy to parliamentary cabinet to civil-military bureaucratic forms of government in the period between 1868 and 1945. Generally the argument that has been presented at least by Western observers is that, as Japan proceeded through the modernization process, each major stage of that process was reflected in a political transformation. One recent description states:

…the Japanese have experienced a variety of political systems over the past hundred years. They began their emergence from traditionalism under the direction of an oligarchy of bureaucrats whose power was sanctioned by imperial restoration. They adopted a limited kind of parliamentarism in 1890 (the Meiji Constitution) that came to a brief flowering in the immediate post-World War I years. Military authoritarianism was in the ascendancy in the 1930’s and became dominant in World War II.

Type
Research Article
Information
Social Science History , Volume 2 , Issue 4 , Summer 1978 , pp. 385 - 398
Copyright
Copyright © Social Science History Association 1978 

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References

Notes

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3 By a bureaucratic polity I mean a system distinguished by “rules of the game” that possess at least three characteristics:

1 That any given legal norm may be established by agreement or by imposition on the grounds of expediency (utility) or rational values or both with a claim to obedience on the part of the members of the polity.

2 Agreement that the prerequisite for evaluating (judging) utility and/or rationality is expertise.

3 Agreement that expertise is based on a career structure combining extended education and service in the public bureaucracy.

The end result of these rules is to give the civil servant a monopoly on the legitimate formulation of public policy regardless of the existence of other structures of politics.

Based on Weber, Max, The Theory of Social and Economic Organization, ed., Parsons, T. (Glencoe, Illinois, 1947), 329–30Google Scholar.

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28 See Crowley, James B., Japan’s Quest for Autonomy: National Security and Foreign Policy 1930-38 (Princeton, New Jersey, 1966)Google Scholar and Ikuhito, Hata, Gun fuashizumu undōshi (Tokyo, 1962)Google Scholar for description of this period.

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