This chapter provides a political-sociological study of the authoritarian police tradition in postwar Japan through an analysis of the organizational change, career paths, and retirement patterns of elite police bureaucracy. It assesses the organizational impact of the sweeping democratization reforms of the police bureaucracy implemented during the US Occupation, as it also pays attention to the persistence and revival of some important institutional and cultural legacies of the prewar police in spite of the regime change. The evolving institutional ties of the police bureaucracy with other state institutions, political parties, and socioeconomic actors are analyzed throughout the era of the political contestation that followed in the 1960s and 1970s, the neoliberal turn of politics and economy in the 1980s and 1990s, and finally, the renewed polarization of politics and society since the 2000s to date.

This chapter highlights that the Japan Fair Trade Commission was not able to introduce a leniency programme because of Sadanori Yamanaka, the leading politician within the Liberal Democratic Party for competition law reform; that a leniency programme is essentially different from plea bargaining; and that a leniency programme does not necessarily detract from the rigid characteristic of the surcharge, the financial remedy applicable to infringements of the Antimonopoly Act. The chapter further indicates that, when Yamanaka passed away, the opposition to a leniency programme disappeared, partly because the JFTC was able to show the legislator the substantial difference between a leniency programme and plea bargaining and the possibility of introducing a leniency programme without it claiming any discretion. The leniency programme without discretion has led to useless leniency applications, not enabling the JFTC to pursue an investigation or obliging the JFTC to grant lenient treatment without getting full information. As the JFTC considered the latter problem, the leniency programme was amended in 2019.