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The story
Kazuhiko Yano (60), who became Vice-Minister of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (MEXT) on August 6, is reportedly the first Aoyama Gakuin University graduate to reach the top career-bureaucrat post at any central government ministry. Of the 2,021 people who passed this year’s National Public Employee General Exam (Japan’s elite fast-track civil service exam), the largest group — 291 — came from the University of Tokyo, but the number of Todai graduates aspiring to become bureaucrats is said to have declined compared to the past, with private-university graduates increasingly filling the gap. Reacting to an article about this trend, users on 5channel debated the reasons behind it. Many pointed to poor working conditions — low pay and grueling hours that include late-night call-ins — and the discussion split between those who saw the bureaucracy’s declining appeal as “a rational individual choice” and those who saw it as “a loss of sense of mission among the elite.”
Published 9/3 (Wed), 5:58 AM
Daily Shincho
This spring, 2,021 people passed the National Public Employee General Exam, the gateway to becoming a career-track bureaucrat. The largest group, naturally, came from the University of Tokyo (291 people), but the number of Todai graduates aspiring to become bureaucrats has declined compared to the past. Taking their place is a growing share of private-university graduates. Against this backdrop, this year’s ministry personnel reshuffle saw an Aoyama Gakuin University graduate rise to the top administrative post at the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology. That person is Kazuhiko Yano (60), who became the ministry’s Vice-Minister on August 6 — the first Aoyama Gakuin alum ever to become a Vice-Minister at a central government ministry. What kind of person is he?
Source: news.yahoo.co.jp / Original article here
What people said
Pay's low, working overtime until dawn is the default, and there's always some lawmaker ready to call you in at 3am — it's a hyper-exploitative ("black") organization, man (lol)
At least it'll toughen you up as a man.
Maybe if they made the whole staff women, things would actually change.
Same generation as you, by the way (graduated 2000).
I knew I wasn't cut out for much, so I focused solely on becoming a civil servant and went to a vocational school instead.
Got hired at my local town office, married by year four.
My kid's already in high school now.
All my classmates from vocational school have wives and kids too.
Wasn't going to university the wrong call?
Didn't you just assume a college degree made you superior and go along without thinking?
You figured studying alone would guarantee you'd win — you were underestimating life, weren't you?
The usual copypasta from a high-school-grad with an education inferiority complex.
Cut public spending and private citizens get some relief. Expansionary fiscal policy is exactly what crowds out private business.
People go to university precisely so they don't end up with that kind of personality (lol)
Does this raise or lower the quality of government administration?
The central government is too corrupt for it to matter who runs it.
Nothing changes unless there's a war, a massive disaster, a revolution, or a coup.
Even if you stack the umpiring crew with talent, that doesn't grow the sport.
Unless you get talented people into the players — meaning the private sector — the country won't grow.
Yeah, civil servants are a non-productive position by nature.
Can you really say that after seeing Shirai?
The sense of belonging to the nation has been watered down way too much.
That's not something money fixes.
There's no way a spirit of serving Japan's future is going to grow under conditions like that.
They don't have a shred of a service spirit.
These days people become civil servants because they're lazy and want an easy, relaxed job.
If they actually had that spirit, they'd be logging 300 hours of unpaid overtime a month on average, no question.
They're forced into exam-cram studying their whole childhood purely to maximize lifetime earnings, so telling them to suddenly "be of service" once they're adults is asking the impossible.
Is judging other people really that much fun? (lol)
Going from Todai Law into the legal profession is what the dropouts do.
They probably don't want to do difficult work. Plus you can't get fired.
Maybe they got hit with the reality that every senior staffer is a walking example of "here's what a hopeless, unmotivated person looks like after fully evolving," and just gave up in despair.
People who don't want to get shuffled around to postings all over the country.
No way (lol). You can't get into Kyushu University without being good at math, and you'd have to study physics and science too — the workload is on a totally different level.
Maybe that's true now, but back when this guy took his entrance exams there was surely a gap (lol)
Once the elite lose their patriotism, all that's left is selfish profit-seeking — nothing but harm, no benefit.
Because their abilities are so high, they're arguably even more harmful than an ordinary person would be.
>Once the elite lose their patriotism, all that's left is selfish profit-seeking — nothing but harm, no benefit.
Come on now — so it's the patriotic Tokyo bureaucrats who calmly:
hop from one cushy "amakudari" post-retirement post to another (the practice of ex-bureaucrats parachuting into cushy jobs), collecting hundred-million-yen retirement payouts again and again,
drive ever more concentration into Tokyo,
strip Japanese industry of its competitiveness through regulations and administrative directives,
and wreck ordinary people's lives with tax hike after tax hike?
You really think they can pull off that string of misdeeds without blinking?
Which country's bureaucrats are you even talking about?
You think you're describing chivalrous gangsters, but isn't that just actual yakuza? (lol)
Apparently even the General Service track gets shuffled all over the country. A Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare General Service employee I know said he'd hate it if his next transfer landed him at some regional Hello Work office.
They call that being a "satellite" (slang for someone endlessly rotated through remote postings). Come to think of it, a certain governor of Hyogo Prefecture might've been one of those (lol)
My brother-in-law is going through that right now (lol)
General Service staff are hired by regional block. In the Kanto block you might get transferred from Tokyo to Ibaraki, for instance. But you won't get transferred to Hokkaido.
A huge amount of tax money goes into the old Imperial universities, after all.
Being able to study under the country's top humanities professors was made possible with the nation's money.
That's exactly why they need to actually serve the public good of the nation.
Yeah, I guess. Back in the prewar era it was like: "A vast national budget has been poured into your education, so work yourselves to the bone in service of the state — especially you who went all the way to grad school and got a doctorate. Work for low pay until retirement, and in exchange your status is guaranteed." "Fukoku kyohei" (rich nation, strong army — the old imperial slogan) was achieved by respecting (lol) the highly educated even more than that. Well, after the war there was also a mood of disdain for a powerful Japan, so things got a lot more democratic (lol)
They're in huge demand in the private-sector job market, so unless the treatment of bureaucrats improves, Todai grads simply won't choose to become bureaucrats.
Background and Key Points of the Debate
The National Public Employee General Exam was once overwhelmingly dominated by University of Tokyo graduates, but in recent years the share of private-university graduates is said to be rising. The factors that came up repeatedly in the thread were poor working conditions — late-night call-ins and chronic overtime — and dissatisfaction with pay that doesn’t match those demands. The sticking point was a difference in values: whether to view this trend as simply “individuals rationally choosing the private sector or local government jobs instead,” or as “the elite, who are supposed to serve the nation, having become selfish.” Commenters pushed back and forth from both sides. Worth noting: the original article’s main focus is actually an introduction to Kazuhiko Yano’s personal career, and it does not itself present data on the year-by-year trend in the number of Todai graduates.
※This article is excerpted and summarized from the 5channel (Breaking News Plus) thread “‘New Education Ministry Vice Minister Is an Aoyama Gakuin Grad’ — Why Are Fewer Todai Grads Becoming Bureaucrats? Too ‘Black’ a Workplace to Appeal to Old Imperial University Grads.”
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