PART THREE—
CULTURAL AND EDUCATIONAL ORGANIZATION

Intellectuals in the Decision Making Process

Herbert Passin

Introduction

English intellectuals, a prominent Japanese writer tells us, have close relations with the upper strata of government, Parliament, and the business world, but they are cut off from the masses.^[1] French intellectuals are cut off from the upper strata, but have very close relations with the masses. Japanese intellectuals, however, have the worst of both worlds: like the English they are cut off from the masses, and like the French they are cut off from the upper strata.

Leaving aside the correctness of the observation about the British^[2] and the French,^[3] is it in fact the case that Japanese intellectuals are isolated and without power? This paper will not try to give a definitive answer to this question but to explore some of the issues involved in approaching an answer. In the broadest sense, our problem is the relationship of intellectuals in Japan to the "establishment" (the power structure, the system). A brief accounting of the history of this relationship may, therefore, be useful.

[1] Kato^[*] Shuichi^[*] , Nihon no nai to gai [Japan: Inside and Outside] (Tokyo: Bungei Shunjusha, 1972), p. 153.

[2] "In Britain," writes English sociologist T. B. Bottomore, "intellectuals have not possessed such great social prestige as in France, nor have they been so prominent in political life." Elites and Society (Hardmondsworth: Penguin, 1964), p. 75.

[3] Mattei Dogan found that more than one-half of the elected members of the French Chamber of Deputies were intellectuals. "Political Ascent in a Class Society: French Deputies 1870–1958," in Dwaine Marvick, ed., Political Decision-Makers (Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press, 1961).

In Japan of the early and mid-Meiji period, the intellectuals constituted a small, cohesive group. This small group was very much part of the then-existing establishment.^[4] The diverse elements of which it was composed were initially held together by the bunmei kaika , the "civilization and enlightenment" ideology that formed the basis of the Meirokusha (or Meiji 6, that is, 1873 society). As a small group the intellectuals all knew one another, and their views weighed in heavily with the political elites. Whether in public office like Mori Arinori, or resolutely outside of it like Fukuzawa Yukichi, most of them were active participants in the public life of their times through writing, lecturing, reporting, teaching, advising, and operating modern institutions. Toward the end of the Meiji period, this unity of the intellectual classes began to break down. The increasing number of graduates produced by the new universities began to replace the Restoration generation.

With this new development, the intellectuals divided into three broad streams: a pro-establishment clerisy, respectable and supportive of the established institutions; an anti-establishment intelligentsia, dissatisfied with the new institutions and with their own place in society; and a nonpolitical stratum of professionals, technicians, and specialists concerned primarily with their own work and only secondarily with politics. As the sheer number of intellectuals grew, their relations with the other elites underwent important changes.

The stream of anti-establishment intellectuals, first adumbrated in the early-Meiji Jiyu^[*] Minken (Freedom and People's Rights) movement, broadened steadily, despite frequent setbacks. Their critical position with regard to the central institutions of the society led them into growing moral and political opposition—a position that crystallized around a variety of movements based on Christianity, socialism, pragmatism, liberalism and, after World War I, Marxism.

The opposition to the forms that the modern Japanese society was taking was based on a combination of motives. One was the traditional samurai contempt for trade, moneygrubbing, and the pursuit of private advantage. Since the samurai were highly overrepresented among the early Meiji intellectuals, their ethos permeated the intellectuals' outlook. To this aristocratic disdain for the vulgarity of a materialist, capitalist (later "mass") society were joined traditionalist and nationalist reactions against westernism (and after World War II against the United States), populism, working-class discontent, agrarian distress, and egalitarian impulses and concepts that rapidly diffused their way through Japanese thought and institutions.

The discontent following World War I, combined with another

[4] See Herbert Passin, "Modernization and the Japanese Intellectual: Some Comparative Observations," in Marius Jansen, ed., Changing Japanese Attitudes towards Modernization (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1965).

quantum jump in the number of university students and the appeal of the Russian Revolution, strengthened the progressive, liberal, and radical forces and led to the well-known confrontations with authority of the late 1920s and particularly the 1930s. Despite severe repression and the frequent surface conformity, anti-establishment radicalism remained a strong latent force in literature, journalism, and the universities.

The end of World War II found the progressives—newly released from the restraints of the militarist period—stronger than ever. The atmosphere created by the American Occupation's democratization program was favorable to them. So was the emergence of other newly liberated elements such as the trade union movement, the radical political parties, liberalism, progressive thought, and women's emancipation. During the first few years of the Occupation, not only the established intellectuals but even liberals, progressives, and leftists were active in public life, particularly in the development of the reform programs.

But with the sharp polarization caused by the cold-war issues, the progressive forces moved sharply away from the establishment. By the end of the Occupation period it would be fair to say that the progressives had become the majority, if not of the intellectuals as a whole, then at least of the principal articulate intellectual elites. The tradition, which had already begun to show itself during the twenties and thirties, was now firmly entrenched. In general, the intellectuals, along with the labor unionists and the students, could be counted on in the "progressive camp." The progressive intellectuals have come to play a dominant role in most of the principal intellectual institutions, including the universities, the mass media, and publishing.

From the end of the Occupation to the mid-1960s, at the same time that the intellectual stratum as a whole was growing by leaps and bounds, the progressive, anti-establishment strain within it was growing even faster. But as Japan approached "maturity," the relatively advanced condition of the post-industrial society, new developments began to make themselves felt. On the one hand, a new polarization developed with the separation of student activism from the intellectual mainstream. The older intellectual generation, whether pro- or anti-establishment, appeared increasingly irrelevant to the new preoccupations. The younger intellectuals, drawn from the recent New-Left-dominated student movements, were more than ever alienated from the centers of power.

On the other hand, however, there was some diminution of the sharp polarization among the older intellectuals. As Japan's economy maintained its steady, high-speed growth, the stratum of scientists, researchers, technicians, specialists, and professionals was expanding and also becoming more involved in the operations and decision-making processes of economy and government. As measured by all the indicators—consultation, research, research funds, public attention, and publication—the demand for the services of intellectuals, which has always been higher

than is generally realized, appears to be going up. As Japan becomes increasingly a knowledge-based society, intellectuals become even more indispensable than before, and their position in relation to the other elites improves. The relative balance among the various intellectual sectors also changes. The literary, humanistic intellectuals have lost some of their prestige as those with scientific-technical expertise have come into increasing demand.

Who Are the Intellectuals?

As in other advanced industrial societies, the number of people engaged in intellectual work in Japan has increased enormously. In consequence, the intellectuals have become, like all large groups in modern society, differentiated, even stratified, and they form, for certain purposes, a political constituency of their own. The borderline dividing them from other groups becomes hard to draw, and their relations with other elites become complex.

For our purposes here, intellectuals will be taken as people who "devote themselves to cultivating and formulating knowledge."^[5] Normally they will be engaged in the professions—university teaching, scientific research, writing, journalism—that require them to spend most or a good portion of their time in creative intellectual work. We shall, however, also have in mind those whose primary work is elsewhere but who engage in intellectual work some of the time.

People primarily engaged in the occupations within which we would expect most intellectual work to fall constitute about 5 percent of the labor force in Japan. If we use the census category of "professional and technical" occupations as an indicator of the intellectual occupations, we find that in the twenty years between 1950 and 1970 they have increased four times as rapidly as the labor force as a whole (see Table 1).

If we look more closely at specific occupations of an intellectual character, the trend is even clearer (see Table 2). The number of university teachers increased about nine times faster than the labor force as a whole, scientific researchers about seven times faster, writers more than five times faster, and the legal profession more than three times faster. Using a somewhat different census classification, we find that in the five-year period between 1966 and 1970 alone, there has been a 34 percent increase in the number of scientific researchers. This is roughly four times the growth of the labor force in the same period (about 9 percent).

Very often, when people use the word "intellectual," they have the small intellectual elite in mind. Just as the business, political, or military elites constitute a very small part of their constituencies, so do the intellectual elites of theirs. But if we include not only the chiefs but the

[5] Robert Merton, Social Theory and Social Structure (Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press, 1949). p. 162.

rank and file, as it were, the apprentice along with the master craftsmen, or to use Shil's terms,^[6] the reproductive and executive intellectual, as well

[6] Edward Shils, "Intellectuals, Tradition, and the Tradition of Intellectuals: SomePreliminary Considerations," Daedalus , Spring 1972; and The Intellectuals and the Powers and Other Essays (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1972), particularly chap. 7.

as the productive, we may very well be talking about millions of people.

Not only do they attract other people to their ideas, but their own votes alone are sufficiently numerous to be important. Politicians, however contemptuous they may be, cannot disregard them. There are over a million teachers alone. Even if we reserve the term "intellectuals" for teachers in higher education, there are still 160,000 of them.^[7] The university, with its 1.5 million students in addition to its 120,000 faculty, plus all the others involved in its administration and maintenance, has become a constituency of noticeable heft (See Table 3). This is especially clear when we realize that about 45 percent of this population is concentrated in and around Tokyo. Most of the 310,000 in the census category of "scientific researcher" (1971) are also located in the Tokyo area, and their weight can be added to this political force.

In thinking about the place of Japanese intellectuals, this concentration of national activities in Tokyo should be kept in mind. Tokyo, like London and Paris, is a true national capital—not only the political, but the industrial, financial, intellectual, academic, artistic, and taste center of the

[7] As of 1971, including both full- and part-time university, college, and higher technical school facilities.

country. In the United States (as in other decentralized systems such as Australia, Brazil, and Germany), there is no single capital: Washington is the political capital but the financial, artistic, publishing, and media center is in New York, the industrial center is in the Midwest, the movie center is in the Far West, and the university population is dispersed throughout the country. In Japan, with the exception of the small Osaka zaibatsu , virtually all elites are centered in Tokyo. This means that in a way that is not true in decentralized systems, the elites are constantly in contact with one another. Japanese intellectuals form a community: they know one another, associate with one another, read the same newspapers, books, and journals, and share a far wider range of common understandings than, for example, do Americans. They also rub elbows with top businessmen, politicians, journalists, actors, writers, and bureaucrats much more frequently than their American counterparts do. Tokyo metropolis constitutes about 12 percent of the total population of Japan, but it includes not only half of the university population, but the main newspaper, magazine, and publishing enterprises, most of the television and radio networks, and close to 100 percent of virtually all categories of intellectual, artistic, and cultural activity. This high degree of concentration strongly conditions the position of the intellectuals in the network of elites in Japan.

Decision-Making

The ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed, the world is ruled by little else. Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influences, are usually the slave of some defunct economist. . . . I am sure that the power of vested interests is vastly exaggerated, compared with the gradual encroachment of ideas. . . . Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back.
J. M. Keynes

Having identified in a broad sense who the intellectuals are, we have now to examine briefly what we mean by "influence" and "decision-making." For some people the word influence calls up the image of a decision-maker leaping to his feet at the intellectual's words and falling all over himself to put into effect the ideas proposed. "Even in a society which is officially an aristocracy," as Irving Kristol writes, "the ruling class never has that kind of instant power and instant authority."^[8]

Another frequently held model of influence is the intellectual advising the power holder (president, prime minister)—in the extreme case even dictating his policy, but in one way or another having a say in his decisions. Japanese intellectuals often refer enviously to Kissinger as an

[8] Irving Kristol, On the Democratic Idea in America (New York: Harper & Row, 1972).

example, even though Kissinger himself has argued the limitations of the relationship.^[9] In its malevolent form, the intellectual becomes a Rasputin or a Dr. Strangelove, the evil genius who exerts a malign influence over the ruler and corrupts the decisions of state. In the more benevolent version the intellectual is seen as the expert or philosopher contributing specialized knowledge or wisdom to the respectfully attentive secular powers. The extreme case is Plato's philosopher-king; although history provides many less than edifying examples of the intellectual-turned-ruler, the image continues to attract.

If this is our model of the influence of intellectuals, certainly there is little of it in recent Japan. Japan does not have a Kissinger; nor has it had, at least in the postwar period, a Rostow or Bundy. But the reason for this difference may tell us less about the relative influence of intellectuals in the two countries than about the relative weight of career bureaucrats. The Japanese Foreign Office has more weight within its governmental structure than the U.S. State Department, and its members have much more prestige than their counterparts in the U.S. Since the allocation of foreign-policy talent is somewhat different from that of the U.S., the relative weight of in-house experts and outside consultants is correspondingly different.

If we look on decision-making as a process, with the actual decision the product of a series of inputs by competitive forces, we then look not for some single decisive influence but rather for a structure of decision. When are the intellectuals themselves one of the political constituencies involved in a decision and when are they not? What is the relative weight of each of the actors in the decision? What are the points, or stages—innovation, judgment, planning, formulation—at which intellectuals make their inputs in the process?

Different kinds of decisions call for different actors, or participants, and each will make a different kind of input. The mix for decisions on military matters will be very different from that for transportation. In a major decision on, let us say, the introduction of a new weapons system, the decision-making mix will include not only the professional military but many other actors as well: the Defense Agency, the cabinet, the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), the Diet, high-ranking officers in the self-defense forces, the Finance Ministry, the munitions-related industry, and the business community. In addition, there would be important inputs from strategic specialists (both inside and outside the Defense Agency), some of them coming from the universities, research institutes, newspapers, and think tanks. The Defense Agency input itself is very likely to have been made up of the inputs of various factions within it: ground versus naval or air interests, line versus staff officers, military versus civilian elements. The

[9] Henry A. Kissinger, "The Policymaker and the Intellectual," The Reporter 20:5 (5 March 1959).

final outcome would also be affected by the opposition parties, the press, factions within the LDP, mass movements, student movements, and public opinion in the broad sense.

Whether any of this intellectual input is "decisive" would be hard to say, but in the modern bureaucratic decision-making process, it would be hard to say whether any single input is decisive. Nevertheless, intellectuals are likely to have been involved from the very first policy-planning stages. They will be among the specialist consultants from the universities, research institutes, or think tanks. Opposition, or anti-establishment, intellectuals would also have made their weight felt, if not through the decision-making apparatus itself, then through the opposition parties, the press, the civic organizations, and the mass movements.

In this total process, how can we isolate out the influence of intellectuals?

The Intellectuals and Politics

Although this paper is concerned mainly with the participation of the intellectual in the process of decision-making in the narrow sense, his participation in the broader political process is, if anything, even more important.

In certain areas intellectuals themselves are one of the main constituencies. Scientific development and education are obvious examples, and in these areas the influence of intellectuals is most effectively brought to bear through organized bodies. Some organizations purport to speak in the name of intellectuals as a whole—the Japan Science Council is the elected representative body of the natural and social sciences. Others represent particular constituencies (the teachers unions), or professions (the Japan Medical Association), or scholarly fields (the Japanese Political Science Society). Some are more political in character, like the Democratic Scientists Association. Although there are many professional organizations, so far, with the sole exception of the Japan Medical Association, they have been politically weak as pressure groups. Since the intellectuals seldom achieve consensus, even on the issues closest to their own interests, it is not surprising that they can only rarely put forth a unified view to compete with others on the field of political battle.

In the more general political process, it is no less true of Japan than of the United States that "intellectuals, more than most other groups, have the power to create, dignify, inflate, criticize, moderate or puncture" the "galloping abstractions" of public life.^[10] Their influence is transmitted through their teaching, their books and articles, which form the basic parameters of public discussion, and the mass media. Through these

[10] Charles Frankel, "The Scribblers and International Relations," Foreign Affairs , October 1965.

means they have an influence, and often a decisive one, on public opinion and therefore on one of the key factors in the background of decision-making.

In many countries the intellectuals are isolated from the mass media. In Japan this is not the case. Although professing dismay about the vulgarity of the media, intellectuals play a very active part in them. The level of journalism, particularly of the national dailies, which occupy the bulk of the market, is very high, and there is also a vigorous intellectual journalism in weeklies, monthlies, and the pages and columns of the great dailies.

Japanese journalism has two traditions that are important in connection with the political role of intellectuals. First, it is strongly oppositional. Since its inception in the Meiji period, it has been, except in the period of militarist control in the 1930s, almost always on the opposition side. Although the national press professes a strict neutrality with regard to parties, its general thrust has been against the party in power. This, along with the fact that the majority of journalists tend to be progressive, has created a hospitable environment for independent and anti-establishment intellectuals.

Second, it is a very individualized journalism with a European-style feuilletoniste tradition. The newspapers carry many signed articles and frequently invite outside contributors. Leading Japanese intellectuals, in consequence, have newspaper outlets that are normally not available to Americans, other than celebrities. It is common, in a way that is not the case in the United States, for intellectuals, scholars, and writers to be called upon for comment on the news, analytic articles, roundtable discussions, and general social commentary. This kind of journalism not only gives intellectuals an outlet for their views, but also a high degree of public visibility (the leading press is national and runs to millions in circulation) and a significant addition to income.

The weekly and monthly journals consist virtually entirely of signed contributions rather than of unsigned staff articles. At least fifty of them provide outlets for intellectuals to express their views and opportunities for them to earn extra income. Although the intellectual journals (sogo-zasshi^[*] ) do not match the huge popular weeklies in circulation, they are by no means "little mags"; they reach national audiences, and they play an important role in maintaining a high degree of unity and communication among intellectuals.

To this high demand from the print media has been added the virtually insatiable demand of radio and television. Here too intellectuals are active on the artistic as well as the intellectual side. They appear frequently as commentators, news analysts, panelists, and lecturers. The relations between practicing intellectuals and the intellectualized staffs of the broadcasting media is much closer than in many other countries. Here again the broad access that intellectuals have to television and radio gives

them an important outlet, enhances their influence by turning them into celebrities, and makes them more viable by adding to their income. The demand from all of these sources is sufficient to support a large corps of free-lance critics (hyoronka^[*] ).

During the postwar period intellectuals have provided important leadership for or identified themselves closely with all the major mass movements, particularly those involving protest against authority. Writers Hirotsu Kazuo and Uno Koji^[*] played a decisive role in the development of the Matsukawa movement which finally led, after twenty-one years, not only to full exoneration and payment of damages to the defendants, but also to major impact on the judicial system, investigation and trial procedures, and the American Occupation's criminal-code reforms.^[11] Although "union support and mass letter-writing campaigns helped create the impression of popular backing for the movement," writes Chalmers Johnson about the Matsukawa case, "it was the involvement of famous Tokyo intellectuals that made the headlines and filled the columns of commentators."^[12]

For further examples of the influence of intellectuals one has only to think of the close relationship of the Peace Problems Symposium (Heiwa Mondai Danwakai) in the 1960 movement against the U.S.-Japan Security Treaty.^[13] Or one can think of Ota^[*] Minoru in the post-1960 antitreaty movement, or Nakajima Kenzo^[*] in the movement for the normalization of relations with China.

Intellectuals are often influential even without the backing of a specific mass movement. The shift of national priorities from the "growth first" to the "balanced growth" policy, which gives greater emphasis to welfare and environmental protection, has been decisively affected by their views. There are, to be sure, many other factors that go into that shift, but the influence of the intellectuals in pushing it against the reluctance of business and government is clear.

Another way of assessing the weight of intellectuals in decision-making is to look at the social demand for their services. While intellectuals, especially the academic intellectuals, like to complain about how ignored they are, there are many who would argue that they are, if anything, too much involved with the powers. Are they, in fact, as powerless as some would like to make out or, on the contrary, too much "the handmaidens of whatever political, military, paramilitary, and economic elite happens to be financing their operations," to borrow a phrase from Roszak's charges about American intellectuals?^[14]

[11] Chalmers Johnson, Conspiracy at Matsukawa (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1972), particularly chap. 5, "The Two Zolas."

[12] Ibid., p. 237.

[13] See George R. Packard III, Protest in Tokyo (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1966), pp. 26–31.

[14] Theodore Roszak, ed., The Dissenting Academy (New York: Pantheon, 1968).

Let us take the example of the academic intellectuals. If we look at the total round of their activities, we find that although most of their time is spent in teaching-related activities—that is, teaching, preparing courses, grading papers, conducting examinations, seeing students, and sitting on university committees—a significant amount is also spent in outside work. This outside work, called arubaito (from the German arbeit ), is very important.

There are two sides to the professor's outside work. On the one hand, he needs extra income because his salary is low. The outside work helps him make ends meet. On the other hand, outside work is also a measure of social demand. Both of these aspects undoubtedly enter the balance sheet.

International comparisons of wages are notoriously difficult methodological exercises. We cannot, therefore, be dogmatic about whether Japanese academics' salaries are low or high on any absolute scale, and whether their share, compared with that of other components of the labor force, is appropriate or not. What can be said is that although they are lower in money amount (as measured by international exchange rates) than American or Western European academic salaries, within Japan they are on the same level as the civil service. This means they are not as good as equivalent positions (and equal years of service) in large-scale private industry, but that they are better than smaller companies and elementary and secondary schools. Although there are differences between public and private universities and great variations among the private universities, academic salaries in Japan range between (at 1973 exchange rates) $7,000 per annum for a full professor just starting and $14,000 for a senior professor with upwards of thirty-years seniority. They can also be expected to go up about 10 percent a year.

But for the great majority of professors, particularly in the better universities of the Tokyo area, salary is only one portion of total income; and in the case of the popular, well-known professors who are in constant demand, a very small portion indeed. Figures are hard to come by, but a good estimate is that for the well-known professors of leading Tokyo universities, the stars or celebrities of the academic profession, university salary often represents no more than one-third of total income. Table 4 gives the results from a 1965 survey on the sources of income for national university faculty members. Table 5 reports the results from a 1967 sample survey of public as well as private universities.

If we compare the Japanese and the American university professor, we can say that the American university salary is higher than the Japanese. Outside work is important for academic income in both countries, but there are three important differences. First, the Japanese professor receives a smaller proportion of his total income from his salary. If we assume that American professors derive 90 percent or more of their total income from salary (there are, of course, many exceptions), on the whole Japanese

professors would receive more on the order of 70–80 percent in this form. Second, the Japanese academic's salary buys him a somewhat less satisfactory standard of living than the American's. Third, the mix of elements that makes up his outside income is somewhat different. Outside income for the American professor usually comes from research, teaching, lecturing, and consulting. In Japan, a much larger proportion would come from writing (both for the mass media and in the form of books) and from panel discussions in the public media, and significantly less from research.

A checklist of outside work opportunities for Japanese professors would look somewhat as follows:

1. Writing articles—in the mass media, general journals, specialized journals.

2. Writing books—textbooks, general books, scholarly books.

3. Lectures, panel discussions, public speeches.

4. Teaching elsewhere—in other universities, governmental training programs,^[15] private business training institutions.^[16]

5. Research grants.

6. Contract research—with government, private business, research organizations, public associations.

7. Consulting (for the same as 6 above).

8. Government advisory commissions.

9. Editing.

10. Private practice (lawyers, doctors).

11. Private business (architects, engineers, etc.).

Obviously, opportunities for outside work vary by field of specialization. Doctors, dentists, and lawyers can have private practices. Chemists, engineers, and architects often have corporate as well as governmental consulting outlets. They will also have access to considerable research funds. Among social scientists, economists are in the greatest demand, rather like engineers. However, there is increasing demand for sociologists and political scientists as well. More practically oriented fields, such as business administration, labor-management relations, and urban planning increasingly call upon social scientists. For the humanist scholar, there may be fewer outlets in government and corporate consulting (although these are not entirely absent), but a larger world of cultural and intellectual activity is open to him: the mass media, cultural journals, editing, public speaking, and civic associations.

Intellectuals and Government

Despite the prevalent view that intellectuals have little or no influence on government, a close examination of the actual decision-making process shows a number of areas of impact, or at least potential impact.

In a broad sense, there are three general postures from which the intellectual can exert influence on government: (1) as an insider, a civil servant holding a nodal position in the internal decision-making process (including high-ranking administrators, scholars in government institutions, policy planners, and even middle-ranking bureaucrats); (2) as a consultant called in to provide advice, information, critical review, or new ideas; and (3) as an independent, very likely an opponent, exerting his

[15] The government runs at least forty schools or training institutes. Most of them are at the university or postuniversity level and are called daigakko^[*] or kenshusho^[*] . Examples are the Defense Academy, National Police Academy, National Defense College, Foreign Service Training Institute, and Social Insurance Training College. In most of these there are arubaito opportunities for academics.

[16] Aside from technical and vocational schools, there are something on the order of one hundred higher schools in private industry at the college level, of which the Tokyo Denryoku Gakuen (Tokyo Electric Power Academy) is a good example.

influence through the mechanisms available in a democratic polity—the mass media, civic movements, and political parties.

Whatever one's position in regard to the establishment, all three modalities are available, if in differing degrees, to intellectuals. While pro-establishment and neutral intellectuals are not likely to take to the streets, nor anti-establishment figures to take positions of official responsibility, such developments are by no means unknown. In general, however, there are likely to be more pro-establishment and neutral intellectuals among the insiders and consultants, and anti-establishment intellectuals are likely to figure more heavily in the third group.

Insiders

Insiders are often spoken of as goyogakusha^[*] , the term for the scholars during the Tokugawa period who provided their services for pay to the Shogunal or domainal governments. The term is, of course, a pejorative one, implying that to work for the "powers" is to prostitute oneself. Pro-establishment intellectuals, or indeed any intellectual who happens to be in agreement with the government position, may find himself tarred with this brush. The term goyoteki-shingikai^[*] , for example, is commonly applied to official advisory commissions that appear to go along with what the government wants.

However we judge the moral and political issues involved, it is clear that there are large numbers of people we would classify as intellectuals who work directly for government. They may be found first of all among the corps of highly qualified upper civil servants. Japan's higher civil service, along with the French, certainly ranks as one of the most competent, dedicated, and powerful in the world. The stringent competitive requirements assure that many of them will be intellectuals, some actually scholarly in their inclinations. They will also be highly responsive to the academic community, often maintaining close personal associations. Many of them are known as intellectuals to wider publics through their writings, and others have an accepted standing in their own professions, such as economics, social policy planning, engineering, or area study. In addition to purely administrative line functions, policy-planning positions fill a good part of their careers.

Intellectuals are also widely employed in government for their specialized knowledge. The exact numbers are hard to estimate, but some indications can be found. There are, for example, about ninety national government research institutes employing about twenty-five thousand research scientists.^[17] (The total number of employees is much higher.) The

[17] Some of these have regional branches as, for example, the Ministry of Agriculture's Regional Fishery Research Laboratories. In addition to the national government, local government entities maintain 551 research institutions (data as of 1 April 1971).

incidence of intellectuals, scholars, and specialists varies by government department. Some, such as the Economic Planning Agency, will have proportionately more than, say, the Ministry of Posts. But even the Ministry of Posts has its intellectuals, at least in its higher administrative ranks, its Electrical Wave Research Institute, the Communications College, and its specialized technical departments. Most of the intellectuals here are, of course, engineers, natural scientists, and technicians—scientific-technical rather than humanistic intellectuals. The largest number of intellectuals will be found in the Prime Minister's Office, the Economic Planning Agency, the Ministry of Finance, and the Ministry of International Trade and Industry (MITI). In general, the more "technocratic" the field, the greater their weight. Important inputs come mainly in engineering and economics, or in areas that involve both such as regional planning, developmental economics, urban problems, and systems analysis.

What impact do they have on government policy? The answer would have to be that in virtually all policy matters within their area of concern, their input of information and their formulation of the issues is very important, but that their direct influence varies in accordance with the particular constellation of forces involved. On purely technical issues, with relatively small political content, their influence can be important. The views of structural engineers, for example, carry great weight in the actual outcome of decisions on bridge-building, although the question of location is often a very political issue. In general, the Japanese government is very respectful of technical expertise. Even on economic issues, which lie near the border of the scientific-technical and the humanistic, the work of the Economic Research Institute (Keizai kenkyusho^[*] ) of the Economic Planning Agency is very influential, even if it is not the only voice involved in decisions.

Some government research institutes carry little weight in their own area of decision. This may be for many reasons: that their sphere is too peripheral to the major priority areas, that powerful pressure groups are involved, that they are incompetent, or that they are badly positioned in the bureaucratic structure. Some semigovernmental research institutes, which depend primarily on government support, for example, are regarded as little more than a place to pasture retired bureaucrats.

It is often argued that the government scholars are not true intellectuals, that they do not decide problems on their own but simply apply their skills within the framework of problems set for them by the government. Such a view is far too simplistic. Much of the work of government research institutes is scarcely different from that done in institutes located in the universities. The sociologists, mathematicians, social psychologists, and demographers of the Welfare Ministry's Population Problems Research Institute, or the scholars in the Institute of Mathematical Statistics located

in the Ministry of Education do much the same kind of scholarly work as those in nongovernment institutions. Since they have budgets, equipment, staff, continuity, and an audience, they are often better off and can do more self-initiated research than outside organizations. To be sure, some of the institutes do a good part of their own research in response to direct government requests or to their perception of national problems. But applied or policy research need be no less scientific than basic research. Much of the work of nongovernmental institutes, in the universities or elsewhere, is also applied research—often contracted for—whereas the work of, say, the governmental Institute of Mathematical Statistics is much more far-ranging and independent than that of many academic survey institutions.

Nor would it be correct to think that government institutions have no freedom at all to initiate research even in basic fields. Some of them, such as the National Institute of Genetics or the National Cancer Institute, are involved primarily in basic research, and it would be more correct to see them as national scientific facilities supported by the government, just as much a part of their field as a university institute. They are also quite capable of producing analyses that are critical of government policy or recommendations that are at variance with current policy. The real problem is more often that decision-makers pay no attention to the work of the government institutes, and not that the institutes have no freedom.

Although the impact of the government scholars and research institutions varies, the influence of the bureaucrat-intellectuals cannot be doubted. They are found among the senior permanent civil servants, whose tenure outlasts the government in power and is more secure. The ministers and the parliamentary vice-ministers (seimu jikan ) come and go, but the jimu jikan (administrative vice-minister) goes on forever.

The Intellectual as Adviser

The work of modern governments has become very complicated and, with the increasing welfare obligations that they have accepted, an enormous range of expertise is required. Not all of this can, or should, be provided from within the government itself. Government finds itself constantly in need of fresh inputs from the outside, which may be for many different reasons—ranging from the need for information, evaluation, or reactions, to a desire for validation or for legitimation to particular constituencies. It is not at all uncommon for top bureaucrats and even ministers to call upon academic authorities for their views. "Osetsu o haicho^[*] shimasu " (Let me hear your distinguished views) can often be heard in bureaucratic chambers.

The principal way that nongovernment intellectuals make an input into the decision-making process is through serving as consultants of one kind or another. The system of advisory councils, of which the shingikai

(advisory commission) is a typical example, started in 1947, under the influence of the American Occupation's desire to build more citizen-participative institutions in what it perceived as a nonresponsive bureaucracy.^[18] Many different types have developed, some permanent and established by law, others ad hoc, some investigative (chosakai^[*] ), and some deliberative in character. Although the principle has been more often honored in the breach than in the observance, the advisory commission is expected to include in its membership representatives of all the important constituencies involved in the particular issue, plus relevant experts, as well as representatives of the public interest. All major constituencies, such as business, agriculture, labor, and women, are represented on the councils, although in varying degrees, but intellectuals (mainly academics) rank second only to businessmen in numbers. Therefore, literally thousands of intellectuals sit on hundreds of government commissions that have variable but on the whole important influence on public policy decisions. Almost all government commissions will have some scholars, whether for their expertise or purely for public name value and window dressing.

Every government ministry, with the exception of foreign affairs, makes use of the advisory commissions. Altogether, there are about 240 (as of August 1972), with an average membership of 30, ranging between 5 and 180.^[19] They vary in importance, impact, size, internal composition, and degree of representativeness, depending on their subject matter, the department concerned, and the timeliness of their central mission.

They also vary in the extent to which they provide a source of significant outside income to the committee members. Most committees pay purely nominal consulting fees, so that participation is considered a financial loss by many intellectuals. A famous writer was recently reported to have resigned from the Central Education Council when he learned how small the consulting fee was; he could make much more efficient use of his time, he said, by appearing on well-paying television or on panel discussions about educational problems. In a few cases, however, the consulting fee may become significant enough to raise questions about people being "bought." The Public Service System Council, which deals with very sensitive issues and very sensitive constituencies, has representatives from labor and management, and pays its members monthly fees.

As expected, the councils vary widely in their impact. One of the major functions of the advisory commissions is to adjust the conflicting demands of the major constituencies involved in a particular issue. The Rice Price Council, for example, has representatives of the farmers, consumers, workers, businessmen, and the general public. When it agrees on a plan,

[18] For an excellent summary in English, see Yung Ho Park, "The Government Advisory System in Japan," Journal of Comparative Administration 3.4 (February 1972).

[19] These represent the advisory commissions established by law. If we take into account the various study groups and commissions established by ministerial ordinance or even more informally, there will be several hundred more. See ibid., p. 437.

the Council's recommendations carry great weight and are hard for the government to reject. The advisory commission's input may be decisive under other circumstances as well: as final arbiter when the major elements cannot reach agreement, or as a pressure group pushing its own recommendations. In other cases its position may be an important, even if not always decisive, input into the departmental deliberations. Often the advisory commission's position, through publication or reporting in the mass media, plays an important role in establishing the frame of reference for debate and in forming the public opinion that influences the government or Diet decision. This is seen clearly in the role of the Central Education Council, or the People's Livelihood Council of the Economic Planning Agency.

Characteristically, the advisory commission will be one of the decisive elements at certain stages of the process.^[20] The Boston Consulting Group analysis of the development of Japan's computer industry gives us a valuable picture of how the advisory commission articulates with other elements in an ongoing process.^[21] The government's computer development program started in 1953, but the first real fruits came only in the late 1960s. The process therefore required a sustained effort of about fifteen years. In 1954, after a false start by the Ministry of Education, which, through Tokyo University scientists, had actually developed a vacuumtube computer, the Science and Technology Agency (then within MITI) began the development of a computer logic using transistors as one of its many internal research activities. In 1955, MITI organized a research committee on the computer whose composition "was typically Japanese, representing all constituencies with substantial interest: MITI officials, prospective manufacturers, Japan Telegraph and Telephone managers, and university research scientists were members."^[22] In accordance with the Electronics Industry Development Provisional Act, passed by the Diet in 1957, MITI established an advisory commission—the Electronics Industry Deliberation Council (in 1971 renamed the Electronic and Machinery Industries Deliberation Council). It consists of "approximately 40 members including vice-ministers of the Ministry of International Trade and Industry and the Ministry of Finance, presidents of major electronics hardware manufacturers, the managing director of the industry's trade association, the president of the industry's computer renting company, and distinguished scholars."^[23] Although "effectively, the Coun-

[20] In its first years, the Central Education Council's reports, for example, were "almost totally devoid of real influence on the formulation of policy," but its 465-page 1971 report was "touted as the prelude to Japan's third educational revolution." T. J. Pempel, "The Bureaucratization of Policymaking in Postwar Japan," unpublished, 1972, pp. 12–13.

[21] In Eugene J. Kaplan, Japan: The Government-Business Relationship—A Guide for the American Businessman (Washington: U.S. Government Printing Office, U.S. Department of Commerce, Bureau of International Commerce, February 1972).

[22] Ibid., p. 80.

[23] Ibid., p. 81.

cil is dominated by its secretariat,"^[24] its 1966 report was "the most important document in the industry's history."^[25] Thus, the advisory commission was only one of the factors making its impact over the fifteen-year period—along with the industry, the bureaucracy, the business community, and the Diet—but at certain stages its actions were of decisive importance.

In addition to the more or less permanent advisory commissions, the government frequently appoints expert or public commissions of various kinds to make inquiries or recommendations concerning specific problems. These are as variable as the permanent advisory commissions in their impact.

Many people find the structure and powers of these commissions unsatisfactory. One of the most important criticisms is that the government defines the issues for them and the first drafts embodying the commission's deliberations are usually written by the bureaucrats. The commission members simply read over the prepared report, express agreement or disagreement, and propose changes. The bureaucrats then pull these together and issue the final report, which therefore tends to be fairly close to the government's preferred position, or at least not too critical of it.

Another criticism is that the government assures a favorable outcome, or reduces the prospects of an unfavorable outcome, by carefully selecting the members. The first panel of the commission appointed to investigate the famous mercury-poisoning case (involving the question of the Showa^[*] Denko^[*] Company's responsibility) was criticized for returning a report favorable to the government position. The commissions are often criticized as mere window dressing, lending respectability to a predetermined government position, and in the worst case as pure whitewashing. Anti-establishment intellectuals, as well as labor people and the supporters of the opposition parties, are therefore very wary about some of the advisory commissions. Taking part, they fear, means being co-opted or accepting the underlying premises of the establishment. Many intellectuals also refuse out of fear of being branded a tool of the government by the constituencies they are concerned with. Faculty members of some national universities, for example, were hesitant about sitting on several Ministry of Education commissions because of the opposition of radical student organizations.

Nevertheless, in spite of their many weaknesses and defects, "their deliberations and reports," as Park says, "often constitute an important preliminary in the totality of Japanese policy-making; and there are numerous instances of commissions having authorized persuasive reports which culminated in administrative policies or legislation."^[26]

[24] Ibid.

[25] Ibid., p. 91.

[26] Park, "Government Advisory System," p. 457.

Government-Supported Research

Another way that intellectuals, particularly academic intellectuals, make some input into consideration of public-policy issues is through research commissioned or supported by the government. Although the volume of Japanese governmental support for outside research is not as great as the American, the outlay for research and development in all fields is rising rapidly. As illustrated in Table 6, for example, in 1970 Japan spent ¥217.4 billion (¥152 billion from the government; the rest from private sources) for the support of university research in science, engineering, agriculture, and medicine.^[27] The corresponding American figure is $2.6 billion. On a per capita GNP basis, however, this figure is much better than it appears: it is certainly better than in many European countries, including the United Kingdom; it is 22.5 percent higher than the preceding year in Japan; and it is on a more steeply rising curve than the American figure.

Although Japan was rather a slow starter in research and development, the investment from both public and private sources has been rising

[27] About $604 million at the 360–1 exchange rate, which prevailed in 1970.

sharply. In 1970, total research expenditures reached ¥1,195.3 billion^[28] —one-quarter from government and three-quarters from private sources (see Table 6). The governmental budget for the promotion of science and technology in 1971, which came to ¥305.5 billion, was 15 percent higher than in 1969 and 4.9 times higher than in 1961. National budgets for all varieties of research show a sharp unward trend. University research expenditures rose over 80 percent between 1967 and 1971. Support for relatively high priority research areas shows steep rises in the past few years: atomic power research, up 57 percent from 1969 to 1970; space research, up 158 percent from 1967 to 1970; and oceanography, up almost 50 percent in one year. Government subsidies and contract research funds for scientific and technological research went up 27 percent in the two years between 1969 and 1971.

Although the funds available for social scientific research are much less generous than for pure sciences and technology (18 percent of all researchers, but only 8 percent of total research expenditures in 1971), they have also been going up proportionately in both commissioned research as well as grants and subsidies. Virtually all government departments give such support, although they vary considerably according to their particular area of operation. The greatest support for social scientific research comes from the Ministry of Education, the Economic Planning Agency, and the Prime Minister's Office.

Government research funds are available to scholars in several forms. A number of government agencies offer pure research grants. The ministries also have research funds available in one form or another through the research institutes attached to them or through their administrative branches. General support grants may be made to scholars on application for any worthwhile project; or the ministry may invite application only in specified fields. Apart from outright grants, ministries may also give selective support for fields in which they have a particular interest and invite scholars to conduct research that has some relation to their own areas of program responsibility.

Think Tanks

Since the 1960s there has been a remarkable new development on Japan's intellectual scene—the think tank. Although some institutes have been in existence since the 1950s, their real development has come since the Nomura Research Institute was launched in 1965. Since then—partly under the influence of such American models as Rand, the Stanford

[28] At the predevaluation exchange rates, $3.2 billion. In 1971, the figure went up to ¥1,355.5 billion, a 14 percent increase in yen amount. Calculated at the then exchange rate of 308-1, it is equivalent to $4.4 billion, a 40 percent increase in dollar amount.

Research Institute, and Battelle—about forty-five think tanks have been established or planned.^[29] Some institutes work for a single client; the Mitsubishi Sogo^[*] Kenkyujo^[*] works for the Mitsubishi group of companies. The Nomura Research Institute, on the other hand, although it does much work on behalf of its parent Nomura Securities Company, also conducts research on broader questions, including molecular biology. The institutes characteristically bring together an interdisciplinary mix of specialists centering on the interface of economics and technology: economists, engineers, designers, planners, survey specialists, and statisticians. Each institute creates its own distinctive mix.

In addition to the government-oriented institutes, the business community has supported the establishment of a policy sciences institute, and each major business group either has established or is in the process of establishing one: the Mitsubishi Sogo Kenkyujo (Mitsubishi General Research Institute), the Mitsui Knowledge Industry (MKI), the Toyota Keizai Kenkyujo (Toyota Economics Research Institute), the Midori-kai (The Green Association, of the Sanwa group), and the Sumitomo Joho^[*] Sangyo^[*] Kaisha (Sumitomo Information Industry Company). Typical general think tanks are the Nippon Sogo Kenkyusho^[*] (Japan General Research Institute), the Shakai Kogaku^[*] Kenkyusho (Social Engineering Research Institute), and the Mirai Kogaku Kenkyusho (Future Engineering Research Institute).

The announcement the day after Tanaka Kakuei's election as prime minister—that a think tank would be organized to put into action his pre-election plan for the "Reconstruction of the Japanese Archipelago"—indicates how entrenched the think tank concept has become. The chairman of the LDP's Policy Affairs Council announced in July 1972 that "he was looking for qualified persons . . . 10 to 15 eminent academicians and a few capable party members . . . to start off its work on how to resolve problems of congested cities, environmental pollution, housing shortage and insufficient welfare."^[30] In July 1973, the government announced that it was in the process of establishing a giant think tank funded at the ¥100 billion level.^[31]

Although these institutes are new, it looks as though they may become an increasingly important channel for sophisticated research input into the government and corporate decision-making process. They also provide an arena in which many scholars and specialists can deal with public-policy issues and make a contribution of high potential impact. Their very existence further enlarges the sphere of consulting and free-lance intellec-

[29] Tallied from tables in Tsusansho^[*] daijin kanbo^[*] johoka^[*] taisakushitsu, ed., Nihon no shinku-tanku—sono kadai to bijon [Japan's think tank: Its problems and vision] (Tokyo: Dayamondo-sha, 1971), pp. 330–336.

[30] Japan Times , 9 July 1972.

[31] To be under the Economic Planning Agency.

tual work in Japan. The consulting fees, research funds, and various forms of compensation available through the think tanks and other research institutes are not insignificant for the changing economics of Japanese academic life.

Local Government

Political power in Japan tends to be concentrated in the central government; local autonomy, despite the efforts of the American Occupation, is still weak. Since so much power is concentrated in the capital, the opportunities for consulting work or for influencing the centers of decision-making are to be found almost exclusively in Tokyo, around the central government, corporate headquarters, and the mass media, rather than in the provinces.

Nevertheless, local government entities provide some channels for intellectuals to take part in public activities. Tokyo's Governor Minobe, himself a former professor of economics, has many academicians who serve as consultants and researchers in his various programs. Tokyo metropolis's Tokyo Tosei Chosakai^[*] involves many academic experts in its work of monitoring environmental pollution and social indicators and proposing solutions for Tokyo's manifold urban ills. The Chosakai is the most active agency engaged in the recently popular "civil minimum" research. The importance of academic opinion, in Tokyo, if not in all of Japan's great cities, may be seen in the fact that even the conservative candidate who ran against Minobe in the April 1971 elections, Hatano Akira, had his platform—the "Hatano Vision for Tokyo"—drawn up by academics who supported his candidacy.

Even in the remote provinces, some participation of intellectuals in policy deliberations will be found. In general, however, intellectuals, including social scientists and humanists, find themselves closer to policy making in areas where "progressives" are in office. As of summer 1973, there were 6 prefectures with progressive governors,^[32] and 6 out of 8 cities with populations over one million had progressive mayors.^[33] In all, there are progressive mayors in 134—or 22.3 percent—of Japan's 579 cities.

In the remote provinces, local intellectuals and academics often find an honored place. They write columns and learned commentaries in the local journals, and they are listened to on the lecture circuits. They are called upon for advice, for entertainment, or for gracing an occasion. Their

[32] Tokyo, Kyoto, Osaka, Saitama, Okayama, and Okinawa. Four others—Akita, Yamanashi, Gifu, and Akita—have nonparty governors elected with the support of both the government party and the opposition Japanese Socialist Party (JSP).

[33] Tokyo, Osaka, Nagoya, Kyoto, Yokohama, and Kobe. The only two with conservative mayors are Sapporo and Kita-Kyushu.

opportunities may be fewer than in the metropolis, but so are their competitors.

Intellectuals and the Politicians

Intellectuals rarely enter professional politics and still more rarely conquer responsible office. But they staff political bureaus, write party pamphlets and speeches, act as secretaries and advisers, make the individual politician's newspaper reputation which, though it is not everything, few men can afford to neglect. In doing these things they to some extent impress their mentality on almost everything that is being done.
Schumpeter

The political opinions and the behavior of intellectuals are seldom to be taken seriously.
W. H. Auden

Despite their passionate preoccupation with politics as ideology, philosophy, value integration, and morality play, most intellectuals' interest in routine electoral politics is somewhat less than enthusiastic. Few have run for public office, particularly administrative offices such as governorships or mayoralties. A Minobe, a former professor of economics and a celebrity, elected governor of Tokyo by huge electoral majorities, is the exception. Perhaps, he is the forerunner of a new type of intellectual politician.

In the representative bodies, however, particularly at the national level, candidates who can be broadly characterized as intellectuals have fared better than might be expected. Approximately 20 percent of the members of the House of Representatives have intellectual origins (see Tables 7 and

8) as against 10.4 percent from business^[34] and 18.9 percent of bureaucratic origin.^[35] The Japanese Communist Party (JCP) has the largest proportion of Diet members of intellectual origins (53.8 percent), more than half of whom are lawyers. The JSP is particularly strong among teachers, and the LDP has the largest number of legislators from the mass media.

In the upper house (Councillors) about 28 percent of the members are intellectuals by origin (see Tables 9 and 10). The proportion is higher on the opposition side than on the government side. Educationists constitute the largest single group, most of them with the JSP, because of JSP dominance in the Japan Teachers Union. These figures stand in contrast to about 8.9 percent of councillor members from business and 24.3 percent (overwhelmingly LDP members) of bureaucratic origin.^[36]

Since the mid-1960s, a number of tarento (talents)—movie stars, television personalities, and popular writers—of whom novelist Ishihara Shintaro^[*] is a well-known example, have made a modest appearance on the political scene (see Table 11).^[37] Since their strength, based on media

[34] Businessmen, owners, and executives (my own calculations). The largest group in most of the parties appears to have come up through political channles—through the party machinery, local assemblies, and (in the JSP) the trade unions.

[35] Those who had most of their prepolitician career in government service.

[36] My own rough calculations from Miyakawa Takayoshi, ed., Konpyuta^[*] ga henshu -shita^[*] seiji handobukku [Computer-edited political handbook] (Tokyo: Seiji Koho^[*] Senta, April 1973), pp. 92–138 Political workers represent about 17.4 percent, the majority of which (25 out of 43) are JSP members.

[37] Ishihara, an Akutagawa Award winner, was elected to the upper house in 1968 with the largest number of votes in the national constituency—over three million. Before his six-yearterm was completed, he resigned to run for the lower house from Tokyo's Second District on December 10, 1972. The District elects five members, and Ishihara won in first place by a large margin.

popularity, is diffused throughout the country rather than concentrated in one single district, all twelve ran in the national constituency elections of the House of Councillors, which is a kind of national popularity contest, rather than in the more narrowly political House of Representatives competition. In the 1971 elections, tarento candidates won the top three places in the national constituency, the only ones to win with more than a million votes. They are all in their first term (which lasts for six years), and they have not yet established a particularly distinguished record. Whether they will last remains an open question. Nevertheless, their popularity is an asset that political parties, both government and opposition, do not lightly disregard.

Even though the extraparliamentary politics of demonstrations, mass movements, civic organizations, petition campaigns, and agitation is more their metier, many intellectuals still find themselves drawn to party politics in the narrow sense. Except in the case of the left-wing parties, they do not expect this activity to be at the Jimmy Higgins level; the nonstaff intellectuals serve as advisers, theorists, analysts, and planners for various parties and factions.

Ultimately all political decisions must come through the Diet's voting procedure or through a single mind, whether that of the prime minister or of whichever decision-maker is involved. Each decision-maker differs in how he reaches his decisions, whom he listens to, what he reads, the forces that influence him. The fact that until now most of Japan's leading political figures have come from a small number of elite educational

institutions has given them in some respects a common culture. Although they differ in their particular views, they often share, even with extreme opponents, elements of a common outlook, a kind of common responsiveness.

The Showa^[*] Kenkyukai^[*]

One prototype of the relations of the intellectual to the powers was the Showa^[*] Kenkyukai^[*] (Showa Era Study Group). Konoye Fumimaro's brain trust, brought together in 1933 by Goto^[*] Ryunosuke^[*] .^[38] Goto gathered together some of Japan's leading antifascist philosophers, thinkers, historians, sociologists, political scientists, economists, and natural scientists to bring the best available intelligence in the country to bear on the problems confronting Konoye, the liberal hope against the militarists.^[39]

Established specifically as an organization of intellectuals, bureaucrats and politicians were excluded from the Showa Kenkyukai from the outset. Many of the members had been regarded Marxists and leftists. By the time the group was dissolved in 1940 it had involved, at its height, some three hundred intellectuals every year in its work. During its seven years of existence, the Showa Kenkyukai carried on a vigorous panoply of activities—studying national problems in detail, preparing position papers for Konoye, and endeavoring to expand the participation of intellectuals in the determination of public policy. In 1936, it spun off a Shina mondai kenkyukai (China Problems Study Group), and in 1938 it formed a Bunka kenkyukai (Cultural Study Group) to deal with the cultural aspects of Japanese-Chinese relations. In July 1938, it also established the Showa Dojinkai^[*] (Showa Comrades' Association), which brought together middle-level bureaucrats, business leaders, and politicians to spread the ideas it was developing. In November of that year it established a school, the Showajuku^[*] or Showa Academy, to train successors in its methods. In November 1940, under the pressure of the wartime mobilization regime that saw the eclipse of Konoye, it dissolved itself.

It will also be recalled that from the China Incident on through the Pacific War, establishment institutions such as the Southern Manchurian Railway and the Cabinet Planning Board involved intellectuals, even leftists and progressives, in their work. To some extent this reflected a respect for academic expertise, but it was also a device to provide refuge for liberal intellectuals. By and large, with the exception of Communists and a few others, Japanese intellectuals offered little resistance to the war.

[38] See Baba Shuichi^[*] , "1930-nendai ni okeru Nihon chishikijin no doko^[*] [Trends among Japanese intellectuals in the 1930s]," Tokyo^[*] daigaku kyoyogakubu^[*] , Shakaikagaku kiyo^[*] , vol. 19, 30 June 1970.

[39] The group included Miki Kiyoshi, Funayama Shinichi, Sasa Hiro^[*] , Shimizu Ikutaro^[*] , Kasai Junichi, Nakajima Kenzo^[*] , Nakayama Ichiro^[*] , Yabe Teiji, Ryu^[*] Shintaro^[*] , Kata Tetsuji, and Royama^[*] Masao.

Although some went into isolation or silenced their voices and pens, most offered at least passive and some active support for the war effort.^[40]

After the War

Although the Japanese military did not like the intellectuals very much, the American Occupation did. Intellectuals were brought into various aspects of the Occupation's work at an early point, providing American officers—who knew little about the society they were commissioned to reform—with expert information. Intellectuals also helped in the formulation of major Occupation programs. During the early postwar years, the Occupation looked on the liberal academic intellectuals as friendly allies. For some of the liberal reforms, the intellectuals, not the "masses," were the main constituency, especially if there was no particular mass base as, for example, in the reform of the criminal code. Intellectuals played a major role at many stages in the formulation of the new constitution, the reforms of the civil code, the educational reforms, the land reform, the civil liberty laws, and many others.

Since the end of the war there has been nothing to compare with Goto's^[*] intensive mobilization of liberal intellectuals to work with Konoye. Ikeda Hayato probably came closest, bringing a small, informal group of journalists, academics, and businessmen in to look at broad questions of policy for him. Since Ikeda had a strong background in economics, he drew a great deal on professional economists for advice. They undoubtedly exerted a significant influence on the development of the economic programs for which he is well known, particularly the income-doubling plan.

Sato^[*] Eisaku, on the other hand, appears to have had no regular mechanism, formal or informal, for seeking outside advice. Nevertheless, he did make a practice of personally meeting many specialists, including foreigners, and seeking firsthand information from them. In economic and foreign policy questions, he listened to a few experts, sometimes at the breakfast meetings for which Japanese politicians are famous. It has been suggested that he was more responsive to favorable advice and information than to criticism. But he was most likely to seek expert advice through the formally constituted groups established by the prime minister's secretariat or by the LDP. One outstanding example was the Okinawa Kondankai (Okinawa Discussion Group), under the chairmanship of Obama Nobumoto, former president of Waseda University. This group, which carried on research, inquiries, public discussions, conferences, and both formal

[40] There is by now a considerable literature on this subject, particularly with regard to writers. Among recent pieces, see Kikuchi Masanori, "Chishikijin to senso^[*] sekinin kaihi no ronri" [Intellectuals and the logic of evasion of responsibility during the war] Ushio , August 1973.

and informal soundings of influential American views, undoubtedly influenced the government's stance on the nonnuclear issue during the negotiations with the U.S. on the Okinawa problem in 1969.

It is perhaps too early to assess Tanaka Kakuei's style of relations with intellectuals. Since he is the first postwar prime minister who did not graduate from one of the elite universities—in fact, he is not a university graduate, and he has a business rather than a bureaucratic background—he did not come to office with a natural inclination toward associations of this kind. It is not clear whether he had a regular group of consultants, but he drew the information that he needed mainly from the network of middle-level bureaucrats that he created during his incumbencies as minister of MITI and of Finance. His well-known "Plan for the Reconstruction of the Japanese Archipelago" was widely considered to have been written up by younger bureaucrats in MITI.^[41]

Most of the leading conservative politicians, at least those with prime-ministerial ambitions, have their own advisers and at times even something on the order of a brain trust. Leading candidates usually have some kind of formally established support organization that holds regular meetings and study groups; in some cases there is also a regular journal or other publications. In these groups, intellectuals often play an important role.

Although the various politicians may have their own brain-trust entourage, the parties tend to operate mainly with their own in-house personnel. The LDP, for example, has a number of study groups (chosakai^[*] ) that work on policy. Essentially an arena for the party to hammer out a position, the study groups usually consist of politicians and party staffers, and conduct their own studies without outside help or consultation. The party committees on the U.S.–Japan Mutual Security Treaty and on Normalization of Relations with China have played an important role over recent years. But intellectuals are not very involved in these committees.

The Democratic Socialist Party (DSP) has the support of the Democratic Socialist Study Group, an association of intellectuals modeling themselves on the relationship of the Fabian Society in England to the Labor party.^[42] Although they provide support and undoubtedly influence the general intellectual atmosphere within which the party functions, they probably do not have much direct influence on the party's legislative program.

The Shakaishugi Kyokai^[*] (Socialist Association) plays a somewhat

[41] Translated into English as Building a new Japan—A Plan for Remodeling the Japanese Archipelago (Tokyo: Simul Press, 1973). A popular joke at the time was that, when the Prime Minister heard that his book had become a best-seller, he said, "I guess if it's so popular, I'll have to buy a copy and read it too."

[42] They publish a monthly journal, Kaikakusha .

similar role for the JSP.^[43] But since the JSP leaders consider themselves to be intellectuals and theoreticians, intellectual organizations function essentially as just another pressure group on the left rather than as an advisory body.

The Komeito^[*] engages in a wide range of study activities, but these primarily involve party members. Nevertheless, the Komeito is somewhat respectful of the views of intellectuals and its parent, Soka^[*] Gakkai, supports a major intellectual journal, Ushio. Ushio is a high quality journal that draws contributions from a wide range of the political spectrum. The party also invites intellectuals and specialists to take part in its frequent study groups. However, the formal deliberative bodies of the party are made up of party members who range widely in their information and idea inputs.

Conclusion

Let us now look once again at our original question: is it in fact the case that Japanese intellectuals are isolated and without power?

First, as we have seen, they are a major political constituency in terms of numbers, wealth, institutions, and power. Second, they are one of, if not the most important of the opinion leaders in Japan. Public opinion, the perceived interests of different elements of the population, the activities of organized movements and parties, and ideological attitudes are all very important in the competition of political forces, and in all these areas the intellectuals play an important role.

Third, their writings often influence the very formulation of the policy decisions at issue, even if their particular position does not happen to win out. When a distinguished professor of Tokyo University's Faculty of Law writes a book or an article, or makes a statement on some public issue, the decision-makers may not leap to obey him, but they are not entirely unresponsive; his work often strikes an echo. Most of the key civil servants, and even many of the leading politicians and businessmen may have been his students or his classmates. In any event, he will be a respected sensei (teacher) whose works they will have studied and who has had a role in shaping their thought. They will therefore reverberate to his views, his language of thought, his posing of the issues, even if they do not agree with his specific political position.

A 1971–1972 survey of leadership opinion, for example, showed that 36 percent of the responses to the question, "Who should be mainly involved in the establishment of national goals?" referred to intellectuals in one form or another (mass communications, think tanks, intellectuals and men of culture, religious organizations, and academia) as against 27 percent that referred to the established political institutions (Diet, cabinet, LDP,

[43] Their journal is called Shakaishugi .

and local government), and 13 percent that referred to anti-establishment organizations (opposition parties, the student movement, and labor unions).^[44]

Nor is this respect for intellectuals confined to the elites. The Japanese masses might not rise to Victor Hugo's call as the French masses presumably do:

Peuples! Écoutez le Poète!
Écoutez le reveur sacré!

But Japanese intellectuals have always had great moral authority. The gakusha (scholars), the sensei (teachers), the bunkajin (men of culture), the chishikijin (men of knowledge) are listened to. Their presence graces the occasion and validates the cause.

Intellectuals have been active politically, and they have often been extremely effective through the organizations and movements in which they have participated. No one can doubt their influence on national politics and even on particular decisions, even if they have not always won all of their demands. The 1960 anti-Security Treaty demonstrations did not, in the end, bring about the abrogation of the treaty, but the Kishi government was brought down and Japanese politics was never quite the same afterwards.

Fourth, intellectuals are extensively involved in all phases of the public decision-making process from the original conception through the planning, information input, development, and final decision stages. This participation is increasing, although the process is uneven. Literary-humanistic intellectuals are probably losing ground while the technical-scientific intellectuals are gaining.

Every policy area evokes a different mix of constituencies and creates its own structure of decision. In some, the intellectuals are important; in others, they are not. But whatever the particular situation or outcome they must be ranked among the decision-makers along with the bureaucrats, politicians, businessmen, journalists, and leaders of civic organizations. In short, they are not as influential as they think they should be, but they are more influential than they think they are.

[44] Tanaka Yasumasa, Koyama Kenichi, and Yasuda Jumei^[*] , "Nihon no kokka mokuhyo^[*] ni kansuru chosa—kiso^[*] shukei^[*] hokoku^[*] " [Research on Japan's national goals—report of preliminary compilation], mimeo (Tokyo: Kokka Mokuhyo^[*] Kenkyu^[*] Project Team, June 1973), table I:1, p. 19. This is a survey of leadership opinion on national goals in which the respondents were drawn from the following areas: politics, government, business, academia, mass media, literature, labor unions, and women's activities. (All the calculations in this paragraph are my own.)

Competition and Conformity:
An Inquiry into the Structure of the Japanese Newspapers

Nathaniel B. Thayer

Independent newspapers speak with an independent voice. But Japanese newspapers speak in unison. Why? Some critics answer that a cabal runs the newspapers. Since these newspapers are critical of the ruling conservative party and tolerant of the opposition parties, these critics further suggest the cabal is leftist. An American ambassador espoused this thesis at a Senate hearing a few years ago. Within the Japanese newspapers, he said, were more than two hundred communists.

The ambassador did not say where he got that figure. The Japanese police said they did not give it to him. The newsmen said they did not know how many communists had jobs on the newspapers but the ambassador's figure was far too high. Others said the ambassador had understated the figure by half. All agreed the CIA had bungled. No one got back to the original question: what reasons impel the newspapers to conform? That answer is now my purpose in these few pages.^[1]

[1] This article is partly the result of personal experience, partly the result of conversations with newsmen, and partly the result of documentary research. I was press attaché in the American embassy from 1962 to 1966. Three newsmen who have particularly helped me in the preparation of this article are Horikawa Atsuhiro, now an editorial writer but formerly a political reporter on the Yomiuri ; Yoshimura Katsumi, now a director for Fuji Television but formerly a deputy-managing editor of the Sankei ; and Matsuyama Yukio, who has served variously as a political reporter, overseas correspondent, and as deputy editor in the foreign news section of the Asahi . I have made reference to Shinbun no shuzai [Newspaper reporting], 2vols. (Tokyo: Nihon Shinbun Kyokai, 1968). I am grateful for the interest and support given me by both the Social Science Research Council and the East Asian Institute of Columbia University for research into the mass media of Japan. Neither the individuals nor the organizations bear any responsibility for the views I have expressed herein.

I start with a description of the Japanese newspapers. There are the noncommercial newspapers which are published by political parties, religious groups, unions, industrial organizations, and clubs. I know of no accurate count of them. Newspapers whose purpose is to make a profit have organized a federation—the Japan Newspaper Association. It has published a list identifying commercial newspapers.^[2] This list includes special audience newspapers: sports, foreign language, shipping, industrial, and entertainment. Most newspapers, however, are general interest papers and they divide into three groups: local, regional, and national. Finally, there are two wire services.

Since all newspapers contain articles on local, domestic, and international events, content is an inadequate criterion by which to separate the lesser from the mightier papers. Only a few papers, however, maintain reporters in most of the government agencies in Tokyo and correspondents overseas. No locals, only a few regionals, both wires, and all the nationals fall into this category.

The Principal Newspapers

In western Japan this is the Nishi Nippon . Its home office is in Fukuoka, and its market is chiefly on the island of Kyushu. In central Japan is the Chunichi^[*] Shinbun , with its home office in Nagoya. Its market is the ten prefectures between Tokyo and Osaka. Several years ago, the Chu-nichi purchased the Tokyo Shinbun , which it runs almost as a separate entity. Tokyo Shinbun has its home office in Tokyo. Its market is the three prefectures surrounding the capital. In northern Japan is the Hokkaido Shinbun . Its home office is in Sapporo. Its market is the island of Hokkaido. Collectively, these newspapers are known as "the bloc" newspapers. Since their markets do not overlap, the bloc papers have arrangements to share facilities and news. It is not uncommon to see articles by one newspapers's foreign correspondent appearing in another newspaper, though domestic stories are more rarely shared.

The major wire services are Jiji and Kyodo . Their responsibility is to supply news to the regional and local newspapers, though today other organizations as well purchase their services. Initially, these two wires agreed to divide reporting responsibilities: Jiji was to handle the economic and commercial news: Kyodo was to handle the social and political news. This agreement is no longer honored. Both services compete to cover every story.

The nationals make up the final category. These newspapers now have

[2] Asahi Nenkan , 1972, p. 239–241.

their home offices in Tokyo but distribute papers throughout the country. The largest national is the Asahi . It has 263 domestic bureaus and 22 overseas bureaus and almost ten thousand employees, of whom better than three thousand are editorial personnel. It publishes eleven morning editions and three evening editions. The morning editions run twenty-four pages and their circulation is six million; the evening editions run twelve pages and their circulation is three million. A network of sixty-two thousand newsboys delivers 99 percent of the newspapers to the home.^[3] Comparable in facilities but slightly lower in circulation are the Mainichi and the Yomiuri . These newspapers are known as the Big Three.

Another national is the Nihon Keizai . It started out as a financial newspaper much like the London Financial Times or the Wall Street Journal . In recent years, its interests have broadened and its circulation has grown. The fifth national is the Sankei . It started as a regional newspaper serving the prefectures around Osaka but has since moved its headquarters to Tokyo and now distributes almost nationwide. Its circulation has been slipping in the recent past.

In recent years, these nationals have expanded into new fields. All now publish weekly, monthly, quarterly, and annual magazines. Most have English language publications and have television and radio stations. They also do outside printing and publish books. Some are in real estate, sound recording, and travel service. Although these ventures seem to be quite profitable, the newspapers remain the core of the empires.

[3] Promotional literature issued by the Asahi Shinbun .

The five nationals, the bloc newspapers, and the wire services constitute the mainstream of written journalism in Japan.^[4] Table 1 gives other pertinent data concerning them. This article examines the national dailies. They dominate the field and I am most familiar with them. Yet most of my remarks will apply equally well to the other members of the mainstream. The regionals do not have the circulation problems of the nationals, but they are quite similar in structure.

The Organization of a Japanese Newspaper

Similarity among the newspapers starts with their office buildings. Though they may have been built at different times and reflect different architectural fancies, their layout is the same. The first and second floors, near the main entrance, are given over to sales, advertising, and in some newspapers cultural activities. The news-gathering section is in the heart of the building on the third floor. Also there, and on the second floor, are the composing rooms where tapes are punched from manuscripts for high-speed typesetters. Plates are sent to presses located in the basement or on the first floor. The newspapers are bundled and taken to trucks which are next door. Editorial writers and the executive officers occupy the upper floors of the building. Table 2 lists the various divisions of a daily national newspaper.

The newspapers break down much like the office building. Each story has its accepted place. For example, important news lands on the front page. Radio and television news is on the back page. The second page has political news. Pages 22 and 23 carry accounts of accidents and incidents.

[4] I do not wish to denigrate local newspapers. They fulfill an important but different role in Japanese society. A good study of their problems and responsibilities is Tamura Norio, Nihon no rokaru shinbun [Japanese local newspapers] (Tokyo: Gendai janarizumu shuppan kai, 1968).

Sports gets a page in the middle of the paper if it has been raining; two pages if it is a Monday. All articles are complete on their pages (Table 3 gives the page breakdown of a national daily).

The two principal sources of revenue for the newspapers are advertising and subscriptions. Until 1963, subscriptions were the dominant source. Now advertising has assumed the lead. But the ratio is still close. In the Asahi case, advertising accounts for 54.9 percent of the revenues; subscriptions account for 45.1 percent.^[5] The ratios for the other newspapers are not much different. Both advertising rates and the subscriptions depend on the number of readers and constitute the ultimate measure of success. Readership has been carefully studied. Each newspaper has a slightly different audience: the Nihon Keizai has a slightly higher percentage of readers in the professions than the other papers; the Asahi 's largest block of readers is office workers; and the Sankei attracts the greatest percentage of manual workers.

Geographical differences also exist. The Yomiuri is weak in Nagoya, because it has not been in that market very long, but it is strong in downtown Tokyo, probably because of its baseball team there. The Asahi is strong in suburban Tokyo. The Sankei does well in Osaka. But the differences are less important than the similarities. All newspapers are trying to appeal to the same audience throughout the country.^[6]

[5] Asahi promotional literature.

[6] Research has also been directed at finding new markets. Is there a group in Japan thatdoes not read the newspapers? The answer so far is negative. Sales, however, have increased with the breakup of the extended family into nuclear families.

The home-delivery practice in Japan means that the newspapers do not have to resort to sensationalism, a tendency of newspapers that rely on street sales. Editors can establish news policies more studied than a flaming headline over a wild lead. Since subscriptions are by month, however, the newspapers do not have an entirely captive audience, although most readers are constant in their loyalties. Editors continuously review their policies, and their efforts are evaluated quarterly by the Audit Bureau of Circulation. Successes get copied quickly. Failures get dropped abruptly. Editors innovate, but most cautiously. Nobody gets too far away from the others. A circulation increase is welcome, but a circulation decrease is to be avoided. Circulation figures will not change much if all papers look the same. Stasis reigns.

Some observers have suggested that the Japanese social penchant for unanimity is as much a cause for similarity among newspapers as the imperatives of a large circulation. They may have a point. But Japan is not the only country where the elements of a mass medium are peas in a pod. Americans rate individuality high on their social scale, yet American television network news programs differ only in their commentators, not their comment. Evening talk shows hew to a common format. A successful dramatic formula on one channel is soon emulated on the other channels.

Circulation is not the only reason why Japanese newspapers look alike. Structure is another. Table 4 presents a model of the news-gathering part of a newspaper. The names of the sections may differ. Recipes may be

Table 4 Model Layout of News-Gathering Structure

found in the women's section in one paper and in the household section in another, but all sections are present in all national newspapers. The basic structure was created about forty years ago and has not changed much since.

The political section is responsible for domestic and national politics. Its reporters cover the activities of the ministries, the embassies, the political parties, the Diet, the prime minister, and the cabinet. The economic section covers the banks, business, the stock market, industry, and the economic activities of the government. The foreign news section handles the reports from the overseas correspondents and translates the reports of foreign wire services or articles from foreign newspapers. These three bureaus are collectively known as the "hard group." In the Mainichi and the Asahi , the managing editor will often have been a reporter in one of these sections.

The sports section, the science section, and the photographic section need no explanation. The women's section covers activities that center on the home—women's lib has hit Japan but not the Japanese newspapers. The cultural section is responsible for education, theater, movies, and other forms of entertainment. On one paper, the cultural and women's section are one; on another, they are separate; and on a third, they are combined with the science section and occupy a part of the managing editor's office.

The social section is roughly equivalent to the city desk on an American newspaper. It covers the police, courts, accidents, incidents, and just about anything not assigned to another section. The social section has the largest group of reporters. The managing editor of the Yomiuri , which has the reputation of being the most easily read newspaper, usually has been a reporter in the social section. These sections comprise the "soft group."

National newspapers require special facilities. The regional section is in charge of receiving reports from the branch offices. The telegraphic section is responsible for transmitting reports written in Tokyo to the other publishing centers. Most nationals have four publishing centers; the Asahi , for example, has centers in Tokyo, Nagoya, Osaka, and Kita Kyushu. The internal communications section receives requests from the other publishing centers and writes stories with a Tokyo slant but of local interest for them.

The radio and television section prepares and transmits news to the radio and television stations belonging to the newspaper. The materials section fulfills the same responsibilities as the morgue on an American newspaper. The proofreaders on a Japanese newspaper differ from the proofreaders on an American newspaper in that they are sharp-eyed and accurate. Typographical errors are a rarity.

The content analysis section compares the stories that appear in its own newspaper with the articles in the competitive newspapers. Every morning, the section chiefs assemble to hear its verdict. Some men do not fit easily into any of the sections; they may have an unusual specialty

or a particular felicity of phrase. They are assigned to the writers' room.

The layout section takes stories from the other sections, evaluates their importance, decides space and placement, and writes the subheads and heads. Administration takes care of household matters. Overseeing this entire operation is the managing editor. He meets with the newspaper's directors, owners and advisers, and represents the newspaper to other newspapers and the outside world. He has three or four deputies, one of whom is always on duty.

A Reporter's Career

A reporter's career follows an established course. He enters the newspaper by examination after graduation, usually from one of the nation's better universities. He is first sent to a branch office in the countryside, where he will spend from three to five years learning his trade, developing his interests, and demonstrating his ability. If promising, he will be brought back to Tokyo and assigned to one of the sections. In all likelihood, he will remain in this section throughout his reporting career.

The first Tokyo assignment, then, is a key assignment. How is it made? Few descriptive statements can be made with certainty. If the young reporter was an outstanding athlete in his university, he will probably end up in the sports section. If he majored in science, particularly a natural science, he is likely to end up in the science section. But all other assignments are haphazard. Sometimes literature majors end up in the economic section and economic majors in the social section.

Formally, the head of the telegraphic section is supposed to satisfy the demand for personnel from each Tokyo section chief with the supply offered by the managers in the regional offices. But often the Tokyo section chief will avoid the telegraphic section open market and talk directly with one of the regional office managers, particularly if that chief and that manager have been reporters together. The young reporter will be consulted. He may have views, but generally he is happy to accept any assignment that means going to Tokyo. The young reporter is not given a veto even though the decision is fundamental to his future.

The region in which the young reporter serves initially may also influence the decision on which section he will be assigned to later. Many reporters who were first assigned to the branch offices in Nagano or Iwate end up in the political section. Since both those branch offices have only one daily edition and few crimes to report, the reporter does not have to get up early and chase the police all day. He can give his time to study and long, analytical articles. Reporters assigned to the Yokohama branch office, on the other hand, often end up on the social desk. Yokohama is served with both a morning and evening edition and, as a big city, has lots of incidents. Nowadays, new reporters are expected to serve in both a one-delivery and a two-delivery area.

Each section has its stereotype. The political reporter is supposed to be

like the politicians he covers. The economic reporter is supposed to be well dressed and gentlemanly. The social reporter is supposed to be rude, but with a highly developed sense of justice. The foreign news reporter is supposed to be scholarly.

Each section, however, is organized along the same lines. It is headed by an editor or section chief. Beneath him are four or five deputy editors, at least one of whom is always present. The deputy editors, who are called by the English word "desk," run the section. Beneath the desk are the reporters, some of whom serve within the newspaper office and some of whom serve outside, either in one of the clubs attached to a ministry or as "roving troops." Some ministry clubs have more than one reporter from a newspaper. In that instance one of the reporters will be chosen to serve as captain (kyappu ). The number of reporters varies from a handful (in the case of the science section) to over a hundred (in the case of the social section). Table 5 shows the breakdown and deployment of reporters in the Asahi political section.

The first assignment for a new reporter in the political section will probably be with the eight-man team covering the prime minister. The reporter will arrive at this official's residence early in the morning to watch for morning callers. He will follow the prime minister through the day until he, the prime minister, retires for the evening. After two years, the political editor will shuffle the reporters around. At this time, the reporter may get to cover one of the political parties, probably the ruling conservative party, since it has a four-man team. On the next shuffle, the reporter may get assigned to the Foreign Ministry or an opposition party. For the next twelve years or so, the reporter will gradually revolve through the various posts his section is supposed to cover. As he nears the end of this period, he will be serving as a captain on one of the larger teams or as desk.

Some teams are more desirable than others. The captain for the cabinet team is primus inter pares . He usually has the rank of desk. The second most desirable team covers the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), the ruling party. Newsmen differ over which are the third- and fourth-ranking teams. Some rank covering the Foreign Ministry over covering the opposition parties; others reverse the order. They all rank assignment to the Diet team fifth and do not bother to rank the rest of the assignments.

The reporter faces change after he reaches age forty. If he is very fortunate, he will be promoted to section chief. This path may lead to a deputy editor's chair in the managing editor's office, and a possible chance at selection as the managing editor. If he is less fortunate, he may be assigned as a section chief to one of the other publishing centers. He may come back from that assignment to serve as a deputy managing editor and still have a chance at becoming the managing editor. If he has no luck, he will leave the desk and take up administrative duties in other parts of the newspaper. He might find himself handling labor problems with the

Table 5 Internal Structure of the Political Section of theAsahi Shimbun(Tokyo)

printers or trying to recruit newspaper distributors. He may end up in book publishing. He probably will not write again. He will stay with his administrative duties until he retires at age fifty-five.

It would take many pages to outline all the career possibilities for reporters, but one pattern is clear. Before age forty, he faces only light competition, at least within his section. After forty, he faces fierce competition for a limited number of important posts.

From Event to Article

Reporters are expected to be able to gather information, compose an acceptable sentence, and work well within a group. The third talent may

be the most important. The political section is small—about forty men. Each man knows every other man quite intimately. Each year, two or three men will move out at the top and an equal number will move in at the bottom. Faces change but only gradually. For many years the same men will live and work together. Competition would bring social friction, which has no place here.

Reporting techniques require cooperation. The observant reader will notice that the only signed articles are written by overseas correspondents. Domestic articles are not signed since they are usually the product of group reporting. Space in a Japanese newspaper is scarce; reporters are many. Several reporters, therefore, are supposed to work on each story. One reporter, sometimes the captain, is the writer. If the captain is not known for his felicity of phrase, or if the team has several stories to produce, the writer will be the captain's immediate subordinate. The other reporters are charged with supplying him with information.

Group reporting results in stories that an individual reporter would not be able to write by himself. The stories on the cabinet meetings are an example. Originally, the Japanese ministers followed the British pattern. Cabinet decisions were announced, but no record was kept of the debate. This policy, its originators believed, would discourage posturing and encourage free discussion among the cabinet officers. In England, this policy has worked. In Japan, it has not. The English press accords its politicians rights of privacy. The Japanese press regards its politicians as fair game at any hour on any day.

The night attack (yo-uchi ) is an accepted journalistic tactic. When a politician returns home after an important day, he will find reporters in his sitting room, drinking his whiskey, and eating his supper. He is expected to talk with them. Every few minutes a reporter will leave the sitting room and phone the writer, both to pass on the politician's remarks and to receive reports on other politicians' statements. A hydra-headed press conference is in progress. It ends when the writer is satisfied he has a full account of the cabinet discussions.^[7] Politicians recognize the efficacy of this style of news-gathering. Nowadays, each minister holds a press conference in his ministry after the conclusion of a cabinet meeting. Even so, his evenings are rarely his own.

Not all stories are the result of group reporting. A reporter may spend years developing a promising politician so that when the politician reaches a position of authority, the reporter may tap him. Another reporter may

[7] Most conservative politicians, certainly politicians of cabinet rank, carry on an active evening schedule. The hour of such a politician's return home varies. Reporters usually arrive early. Who takes care of the reporters until the politician arrives? Political households divide into two groups. In the first group the responsibility falls to the wife. The Sato, Ikeda, Fukuda, Miki, Ohira, and Shiina households fall in this category. In the second group, the wife never appears. The Ishibashi, Kishi, Tanaka, Ono, and Kono households fall in that category. Mrs. Nakasone has just moved from the latter to the former category.

spend long hours analyzing a political problem and come up with an insight no one else has realized. A third reporter may stumble over a scoop while wandering through the corridors of the Diet. Such stories are individually written. And if the story is outstanding, the managing editor will hand out a cash reward. But the reward will be given to the section, not the man. The section chief usually turns the money over to a Ginza madame, and the section drinks it up.

The passage of a story from reporter's manuscript to placement in the paper is also a group endeavor. The reporter turns his story over to the desk. The desk makes the first evaluation of its news value. If the story is too long, he will cut it. If the story is too short, he will flesh it out with other stories, or with analysis. One copy of the story goes to the radio and television section, another to the telegraphic section for transmission to the other publishing centers, and a third to layout.

Layout makes the next evaluation. Is the story important enough to go on the front page, and if so, where? Are pictures part of the story? How much space should be given to them? Finally, heads and subheads: how big, how long, how many? If a desk cannot live with the decisions of the layout editor, he may appeal to the deputy editor on duty in the managing editor's office. But appeals are rare.

Each of the other publishing centers of the newspaper has received a copy of the Tokyo story. Each layout section goes through the same process as the Tokyo layout section. Within each section liaison men keep the other publishing centers informed on what its layout section is doing, but each publishing center makes independent decisions. In effect, the paper is being put together in quadruplicate. Each publishing center's judgment is being tested against the others.

Other newspapers get into the act. During the day, editions close about every thirty minutes. As each edition is published and distributed, other newspapers acquire copies. One paper may have news that another paper lacks. If so, a reporter is dispatched to fill the gap. One paper may interpret the facts differently than another. If so, the reporter will be called upon to justify his observations. One paper may play a story big, and another paper may play a story small. Layout sections in both papers will probably make adjustments. Big cities get the last editions. Publishing centers are there, and time does not have to be allocated for transportation. By the time these city editions are published, all national dailies look much the same.

What about competition? It is present. The scoop is a hallowed institution, even though it may only last an hour, and monthly subscriptions preclude the papers from making any money off it. But competition is not limited to rivalries among newspapers. Competition also exists between the sections in the same newspaper. An example is an incident that occurred in the spring of 1966.

A general election was in the offing. Rumors began to percolate that a

sugar company had close financial ties to conservative politicians. The transportation minister was discovered to have ordered express trains to stop at local stations in his election district. His secretaries were found to be soliciting transportation businesses to join the minister's fan club at high initiation fees. The Defense Agency chief was found to be using generals, bands, and airplanes in his campaigning.

The economic reporters looked into the sugar company. They found nothing unprecedented and so did not write articles. The political reporters said the activities of the transportation minister and defense chief were harmless. They did not want to waste big newspaper bullets on such small game. The social reporters did not agree. They argued that any corruption, be it minor or long-standing, requires exposure. They investigated independently and wrote articles for their part of the papers. What the social reporters had started, the economic and political reporters were obliged to continue. Before long, the papers were filled with little else. Scandal became the major issue in the campaign.

The election tally suggests that voters agreed with the economic and political reporters. All the politicians involved in the scandals were returned to office, the transportation minister with the highest plurality he had ever obtained. But the important point for us is that the squabble was between the sections, not the reporters. Alliances were between newspapers and opponents were within the same newspaper.

The Press Club

An institution that has contributed to breaking down the loyalty of a newsman to his newspaper has been the press club. All nations have press clubs, but Japanese press clubs are unique.

Press clubs are attached to each government agency and other important offices. The largest is the Nagata Club. It has two hundred and seventy members from seventy news companies. It is responsible for covering the prime minister and his cabinet. The smallest press club might be made up of the ten newsmen covering the mayor of a small city. Although no one has yet counted all the clubs, estimates run to at least a thousand. They constitute the principal vehicle for bringing news to the newspaper.

No one is sure how the press clubs started. The story is that newsmen used to gather under a tree in the Marunouchi section of Tokyo to eat lunch and exchange stories. If no one is alive who can substantiate that story, neither is there anyone to deny it. Extant records show the presence of a newsmen's club in the Imperial Diet of 1890 and in some of the ministries of 1902. Today's clubs have grown in number and become much more elaborate. But the functions of the original club—pleasure

(lunch) and business (exchanging stories)—still seem to be in evidence.^[8]

The most important clubs are in the national ministries in Tokyo. I will describe the Kasumi Club, which is attached to the Foreign Ministry, but the description will fit most other clubs.

At the end of the corridor on the third floor, right over the main entrance to the Foreign Ministry, and just beneath the office of the Foreign Minister, are a set of double doors. Pasted to one of them is a sign restricting admission to members. Inside is a large L-shaped room. Desks fill the space under the windows. The Asahi men sit directly in front of the double doors. There are five of them and they have four desks. The Yomiuri men occupy a similar cluster of desks on the north exposure. Mainichi has the corner. Smaller newspapers have fewer men and occupy less space. Some local papers, whose men do not show up very often, are obliged to share a single desk but with individual drawers.

Around the corner, on the leg of the L are the common facilities: a couch, usually decorated with a sleeping newsman; a blackboard listing the time and the subject of the various briefings offered by officials that day; a television set, a mahjong set, a go board and stones, and a Japanese chess set. Telephones are on all desks and a few other places besides. A young man is charged with keeping the room neat, but he is not too efficient. The furniture is shabby. Dust and papers cover everything.

The clubs limit their membership. Generally, reporters whose newspapers belong to the Japan Newspaper Association are admitted. Reporters who work for party, religious, company, union, and foreign media are excluded. The foreign media have been protesting their exclusion for years. Recently the Nagata Club relaxed restrictions. Foreign newsmen may now attend prime minister's public press conferences and ask questions through the club spokesman after the club members' questions are exhausted. Other clubs have not dropped their barriers. Table 6 shows the composition of the Kasumi Club.

Each club has formal written rules.^[9] Violations of these rules can lead to discipline, which may involve expulsion from the club. The bureaucrats will usually honor a club decision, and a newspaper can find itself without access to information from a ministry if it or its reporters do not follow the club regulations.

Fights have occurred between the clubs and the newspapers over who speaks for the reporters. The issue usually involves the handling of news where the club has reached an agreement with which a newspaper has refused to comply.^[10] These incidents have occurred often enough to have

[8] A brief history of the Japanese press clubs has been written by Fujii Tsuguo in Shinbun no shuzai , II, 266–290.

[9] Nagata Club rules can be found in Shinbun no shuzai , I, 118–120.

[10] Handling of the news means management of the news. Management may sound offensive, but some regulation is necessary. For example, if a ministry issues a long study, the reporters must agree when articles based on the study are to be published. If there is noagreement, the reporters must write for the next edition. Justice is done neither to the reporters nor to the document.

This problem of news management has received a great deal of attention within the newspapers and within the Japanese Newspaper Association. The conclusion seems to be that agreements made among the newsmen are acceptable, but agreements made between newsmen and officials are not. The assumption underlying this conclusion is that newsmen are interested in publishing information, whereas officials are interested in suppressing information.

As a former official and news manager, I should like to suggest that officials are not interested solely in news suppression. I hope this paper gives some intimation that reporters are not concerned solely with the publishing of information.

the Japan Newspaper Association attempt to resolve the differences between the club and the newspaper. It has suggested, and the parties have adopted, the rule that no club can make an agreement without the concurrence of all the newspapers. In principle, this rule sounds good. In practice, it is unwieldy.

In the Foreign Ministry, for example, the administrative vice-minister, the highest-ranking professional diplomat, talks every evening for an hour with the Kasumi Club members. His guidance is necessary if the reporters are to understand the intentions of the Japanese government. The vice-minister should speak bluntly. Yet bluntness is not a diplomatic virtue. If the vice-minister wants to spend the following day doing something other than defending his position to other nations' ambassadors, he will request the reporters to attribute his views to some generalized authority rather than to him directly. On some occasions, he may speak completely off-the-record. In theory, each of these requests should be referred to the newspapers for decision. In practice, the newsmen do not bother.

The occasional spats with the newspapers heightens the solidarity of the club. To my knowledge, only one major club—the Metropolitan Police Club—has partitioned off the desks of the various newspapers, and that was the officials' not the reporters' idea. In the other clubs, the desks are together; there are no walls except the exterior walls. The clubs are cooperative bodies.

They have to be. Reporters almost live in the clubs. They arrive in mid-morning and remain until early evening. Some reporters go directly from their home to the club and back. They show up in the newspaper offices only on payday.

Reporters are supposed to be available at all times, although if a reporter wanders away for the afternoon, other reporters will cover for him. If his desk calls, they will say he is off for an interview and, if news is announced, they will inform him of it when he returns.

What do the reporters do all day? Japan has wire services that report all the news, but only the local papers rely on them. Mainstream papers expect their reporters to call in each item themselves. During the day, reporters have to be on hand to update stories as successive editions close. They listen to the lectures held for them by officials, and they wander around the building. But most of the time, they talk among themselves. Hours are spent trying to decide what is important and what is not, analyzing interest, and puzzling out motive. It is not unusual that these discussions have a conclusion or that the conclusion shows up in all the newspapers. The clubs, then, often reach news judgments collectively. The system encourages the practice. The reporters have long ago learned that if all stories carry the same interpretation the desk will not question them. Phone calls come only when one story differs from another.

The clubs were started by the newsmen as a way of compelling attention from the bureaucrats. The bureaucrats may have initially opposed the clubs, but they soon learned that the clubs were in their interest as well. It is easier to handle a club's single request than to handle all the reporters' requests individually. Since the club is always leveling demands, it is easy for the officials to determine what the reporters are thinking and how they

will be reporting. Since a reporter never wants to take the responsibility of failing to report what the government thinks important, the club proves to be a valuable vehicle for the ministry's public relations efforts. A bureaucrat soon learns that if he hands out sufficient news, the reporters will search no further. The skillful bureaucrat, then, through the judicious handling of briefings, lectures, and comment, can greatly influence what the reporter will write.

Clubs also exist among Japanese overseas correspondents. These clubs are slightly different. No one sits in a special room all day waiting for news to be given him. But in some respects, ties in the overseas press clubs are stronger than in the domestic clubs. Language barriers, inability to move freely through a foreign capital, lack of deep understanding of the foreign country, all encourage the reporters to make news-gathering a collective effort. The foreign news desk compares his correspondent's story with that of his competitor. So long as both stories look the same, the desk is satisfied that he is reading the truth.

Views on Conformity

I have described the system enough now so that the reader is aware that all parts of the system urge conformity. What about the reporters? Are they willing to withstand these pressures? Or do they go along with them?

The Japan Recruit Center surveyed college graduates to discover which company they wished to join. The Asahi rated eighth on the list; most other national newspapers were not far behind. This popularity has meant that the papers can choose from among the top graduates of the land for their reporters. These circumstances are considerably different than before the war when journalism was not quite a respectable profession and the reporters were not always top drawer. But the old reporters regarded journalism as a calling; the new reporters seem to regard journalism as a job.

Support for this view comes from Ozaki Morimitsu, chairman of the literature department of Tokyo University, who has written a book describing the employment patterns of graduates from his department. He divides the years after the war into three periods. The first is from the end of the war until 1956 when almost all graduates became schoolteachers. The second period is from 1956 to 1960 when graduates mostly entered publishing, broadcasting, and newspapers. The third period runs to the present. While most of the graduates continue to join mass media, significant numbers were also beginning to enter manufacturing concerns, trading firms, and government agencies. These data suggest that working for a newspaper has become just another job,^[11] though a damned good one.

[11] Morimitsu Ozaki, Shushoku^[*] [Employment] (Tokyo: Chuko^[*] Shinso, 1969). See also Shinbun no shuzai , I, 9–10.

Finally, is it disadvantageous that all the newspapers look and sound the same? A Japanese would not pose that question. His society regards the unanimous decision as the correct decision. If all the newspapers have come around to saying the same thing, then what they are saying is correct.

Only an American would ask that question. His society believes that the truth is elusive, that the best way to apprehend it is to surround it with diverse views. It is easy, then, to dismiss the question by saying that the American will see disadvantages, the Japanese will not.

Yet even an American can see some advantage in having the newspapers speak with a single voice. If the role of the newspapers is to serve as a transmission belt of government ideas to the people, then the Japanese newspapers are most efficient. The five o'clock musings of the vice-minister of foreign affairs are laid on twenty-five million breakfast tables the next morning. When I worked in public affairs in the State Department, we used to regard six months as a fair interval for informing the American public of a change in policy.

If the role of the press is to oppose the government, then a single-voiced press is good. If the government has the power to speak with one tongue, so should the newspapers.

But there are dangers. A Japanese news story is as much a product of the internal pressures in the newspaper world as it is of external event. There is a delicate balance here, and if that balance is upset, the reader's interest is not served.

Not much danger is done in the domestic sphere. The Japanese reader innately knows his society and possesses common sense. He may even have news sources independent of the newspaper. He was not overwhelmed when all the newspapers urged that the rascals be thrown out of office in 1966.

But the Japanese reader does not have an innate understanding of foreign countries. Common sense in one country is not common sense in another. The Japanese reader does not have independent sources of news. I find Japanese reporting of international affairs factitious and thus dangerous, particularly in a world of growing interdependence in which the businessman, the scholar, and the professional are as important to international goodwill as the diplomat. The diplomats have their own sources of information. The others do not. Japan does not have a good record of either understanding or projecting other nations' behavior. Perhaps the reason lies with the newspapers.

The most frightening aspect of Japanese journalism is, for me, its conformity. Nowhere has this conformity been more apparent than in the newspapers' dealings with the People's Republic of China.^[12] In order to

[12] A former reporter, now critic, Miyoshi Osamu, first described relations between the Japanese newspapers and the People's Republic of China in Keizai Orai^[*] , April 1972. Foreigncorrespondent Sam Jameson further elaborated this description in the Los Angeles Times , April 14, 1972. Professor Eto^[*] Shinkichi has analyzed both content and bias of the China stories published by the Japanese newspapers in Bungei Shunju^[*] , April 1972.

dispatch news correspondents to the mainland, the Japanese newspapers have been willing to accept three political principles imposed by the Chinese government. These principles were formalized in an agreement in 1968 but had been tacitly accepted as early as 1964. The Japanese newsmen abjure: (1) pursuing a hostile policy towards China; (2) participating in any plot to create "two Chinas"; and (3) obstructing the restoration of normal relations between Japan and China.

The Chinese authorities have interpreted these principles unusually and applied their interpretations harshly. They expelled the Mainichi, Sankei , and Nishi-Nippon correspondents because their newspapers had carried "anti-Chinese cartoons and reports." They expelled the Yomiuri correspondent because that newspaper had underwritten the exhibition of Tibetan treasures in Tokyo. They arrested the Nihon Keizai correspondent, charging that "he stole a great deal of Chinese political, economic, and military information and handed it to American and Japanese reactionaries." The correspondent was incarcerated for a year and a half.

The correspondent for NHK, the government radio and television network, had his reentry permit refused twice: the first time because NHK carried a program about Taiwan, and the second because NHK maintained membership in the Asian Broadcasters' Union, of which Taiwan was a member country. The Asahi 's correspondent had his permit held up because his newspaper reported on the NHK Taiwan program. The Kyodo correspondent was expelled from China because his wire agency had sponsored a meeting of the Organization of Asian News Agencies, which also included Taiwan.

No Japanese newspaper protested these Chinese acts. To the contrary, more than one editor sent a letter to the Chinese authorities apologizing for his newspaper's behavior. (Some letters were demanded by the Chinese; other letters were unsolicited.) The Japanese public was not informed of what was going on.

To the credit of the Japanese press, the editors spent long hours debating whether they were responding correctly. Often the question was raised whether the freedom of the press was in jeopardy. At one stage in the proceedings, the editors were on the verge of protesting the Chinese actions and stating publicly that they had done so. One newspaper was obdurately opposed. Its concern with keeping its correspondent in Peking was overriding. It threatened to walk out if such a protest were sent. A wire agency also felt much the same way. Rather than split the group, the editors went along with the Chinese demands.

The Japanese have a press code. Its first article reads in part: "The press have complete freedom of information and comment. . . . This freedom

must be protected by all means as a fundamental human right." All Japanese reporters and editors whom I have ever met subscribe wholeheartedly to this provision. They are utterly serious when they quote it to you. But if the Chinese case is any criterion, there is something more fundamental than the freedom to inform and comment. That is the urge to conform.

George Orwell has written about conformity. He has found it a greater threat to freedom of speech than outright government censorship. I quote from his introduction to Animal Farm , an introduction which, ironically, was suppressed:

At any given moment, there is an orthodoxy, a body of ideas which it is assumed that all right-thinking people will accept without question. It is not exactly forbidden to say this, that, or the other, but it is "not done" to say it, just as in mid-Victorian times it was not done to mention trousers in the presence of a lady. Any one who challenges the prevailing orthodoxy finds himself silenced with surprising effectiveness. A genuinely unfashionable opinion is almost never given a fair hearing, either in the popular press or in the highbrow periodicals.^[13]

George Orwell was writing about England during the war years, but I believe that his words have pertinence in Japan today.

[13] George Orwell, "The Freedom of the Press," New York Times Magazine , October 8, 1972, p. 8.

Organizational Paralysis:
The Case of Todai

Ivan P. Hall

Among the various subsystems of Japanese society today, the university must rate rather close to the bottom of the scale in terms of organizational adequacy and effectiveness in decision-making. The violent campus upheaval of 1968–1969 and the calls for drastic reform emanating from the government as well as the general public reflect the fact that the universities have adjusted far more slowly than have other subsystems to the requirements of Japan's emerging postindustrial society. Meanwhile, the inability of the universities to initiate meaningful reforms by themselves underscores serious flaws in their decision-making processes.

Nowhere have these problems surfaced more dramatically than in the case of Tokyo University (ab: Todai, pron: Todai^[*] ). As Japan's first (and until 1898, only) modern university, as the model for the other national (formerly imperial) universities, as the bellwether of Japanese higher education as a whole, and as the training ground for Japan's bureaucratic, political, intellectual, and social elite, Todai for all its special features provides important clues to the ailments of Japanese universities in general.

This paper will discuss organization (primarily structure) and decision-making at Todai today. In order to place patterns and problems in a broader evolutionary perspective, each of these two themes will be introduced by a brief historical account. The final section will mention some of the proposals for the future.

I should like to make it clear here that by contrasting Todai to a somewhat abstracted American pattern, I do not mean to imply any value

judgments. The yardstick I aim to use is functional performance. If much of my language about Todai is negative, this simply reflects my impression, as an outsider, of considerable organizational dysfunction—an impression fortified by loudly voiced Japanese frustrations with an institution which seems to be operating less than adequately in its own terms and in its own context.

Organization:
Structural Characteristics

Japanese universities today are prisoners of their past. At Todai, too, inherited structure has created not only the specific problems that urgently require decisions for reform, but also many of the obstacles that lie in the way of reaching those decisions effectively. The case of Todai serves as an eloquent reminder that behavior in a modernizing society is a product not only of traditional cultural conditioning but also of objective structural realities—whether imported or homespun—which have been arbitrarily created and imposed at specific historical points.

The most basic structural characteristic at Todai—with far-reaching implications for the decision-making process—is its organization into the highly distinct and quasi-independent Faculties or Gakubu (these are administrative units; this usage will be capitalized throughout to avoid confusion with "faculty" in the sense of teaching staff). There are nine Faculties—Law, Medicine, Engineering, Literature, Science, Agriculture, Economics, Education, and Pharmacology, all located on or near the main campus in the Hongo^[*] district. The College of General Education, which enrolls all undergraduates during their first two years, is located apart from the main campus in the Komaba district, but organizationally it is the equivalent of a tenth Faculty.

These Faculties are far more comprehensive and powerful than the typical department on an American campus, and they are considerably more independent of the university's central administration than even the graduate professional schools attached to American universities (such as law, medical, and business schools), which they resemble in some respects. Since general or liberal education at Todai has its own plant, faculty, and curriculum outside the main Faculty structure in the College of General Education, the Todai Faculties concentrate on undergraduate teaching at the professionalized third- and fourth-year levels, and on postgraduate teaching and research. The Faculty staffs, however, are burdened primarily with undergraduate teaching, which is Todai's main mission. With the best and most lavishly funded graduate and research facilities in Japan, Todai still has only four thousand of its sixteen thousand students in the graduate school (daigakuin ). The graduate school is little more than a loose association of research divisions (kenkyuka^[*] ), which are in effect extensions of the respective Faculties. Todai's fourteen research institutes (kenkyujo^[*] ) have independent staffs, but their members retain strong

personal ties with their former Faculties. In many cases, the best research and graduate training in Japan today is found outside the university system, in the government and business sectors.

The overall result has been an articulation between general education, specialized education, and research quite different from the pattern in the United States. If the typical American university may be viewed as an upright T —with a smooth vertical articulation between general and specialized courses in its four-year college, crossed at the top by the robust horizontal of its professional and research-oriented graduate schools, then perhaps Todai may best be described as an upside-down T —with the massive vertical components of its ten Faculties resting uneasily on the detached freshman-sophomore course and petering out at the top in impoverished, inadequately organized, and clique-ridden research facilities.

This paradigm, for all its clumsiness, pinpoints the three major structural problems facing Todai today: (1) its division into rigid vertical units that often paralyze university-wide decision-making in the name of Faculty autonomy; (2) the orphaning of general education; and (3) the weakness of research.

The Historical Background

The autonomous spirit of Todai's Faculties derives in part from their initial constitution as separate colleges (bunka daigaku , literally "branch universities") under the Imperial University Ordinance (Teikoku Daigakurei) of 1886. While the 1886 ordinance is responsible for the basic physiognomy of the school, there are two other watershed dates that are important in the university's historical evolution: 1918, when the University Ordinance (Daigakurei) officially divided the graduate school into Faculty-related research divisions; and the late 1940s, when an expanded and in some respects debased preparatory course at the former First High School (Daiichi Kotogakko^[*] ) at Komaba was telescoped from three into two years and tacked onto the prewar course at Hongo^[*] in an attempt to realize general education.

In 1877, Tokyo University was established on the "amalgamated college" pattern then popular in the United States, with four departments but no graduate school. Its Department of Medicine was the direct descendant of the medical school of the Shogunate government (Igakusho^[*] ), while the three other departments (law, science, and literature) were the collective heirs of the government's School for Western Studies (Kaiseijo). The old Confucian Shoheiko^[*] (Samurai School), which had formed the "Main Campus" (Honko^[*] ) of the 1869–1871 Daigakko^[*] (university) and supported traditionalism during those years, disappeared without a trace after the establishment of a modern Ministry of Education

(Monbusho^[*] ) in 1872, and left the new university with a Western-oriented, strongly utilitarian spirit.

In 1886, Education Minister Mori Arinori gave Todai its "imperial" sobriquet, placed it firmly under the control of the Ministry of Education, provided it with an independent and comprehensive graduate school, and reorganized it into the five colleges of law, medicine, engineering, literature, and science—incidentally taking a lead on Germany, France, and England with the engineering college. The colleges were to "teach the theory and application of the arts and sciences," while the graduate school was entrusted with "mastering their secrets," i.e., basic research.

Mori's aim was to raise up as rapidly as possible the bureaucratic, technocratic, and academic elite, as well as the fund of modern scientific and technological knowledge needed to bring Japan abreast with the Western powers. His frame of reference, often criticized for having been too "statist," was not all that different from the policy of present-day developing countries, which have to allocate resources rather narrowly for maximum impact. Likewise, his importation of the German graduate-school and research ethos was simply in line with a modern trend that was beginning to infect the Anglo-Saxon countries at about the same time. The imperatives of forced modernization, however, were not congenial (then as now) to the cultivation of humanistic, general educational, interdisciplinary approaches.

The vertical configuration of Japanese higher education owes much to this initial scramble for expertise—the effort to push each field ahead as fast as it would go. The concern for the totality and interrelatedness of knowledge—which the Western universities had inherited from their early nurture at the hands of medieval philosophy and Renaissance humanism—was lost by the Japanese when they found their own Confucian tradition wanting and abandoned it.

The colleges of 1886 operated with little concern for each other. Each college had its own faculty, regulated its own curriculum and examinations, and issued its own diplomas—subject to ministerial approval and standards. From an early date the teaching staff of each college began to meet informally in a Faculty council (kyojukai^[*] ) to discuss the practical running of their school. Coordination of the university as a whole was accomplished through a president (socho^[*] ) who was the direct appointee and representative—the proconsul, in effect—of the Ministry of Education and who kept tight control over the several college principals (gakucho^[*] ) who in turn, although professors in their respective colleges, were also selected by the education minister. The principal dealt with the university authorities and concerned himself with matters on the intercollege level. Intracollege affairs were in the hands of a vice-principal (kyoto^[*] ), who was likewise appointed from the professorial corps by the minister and who was responsible for "maintaining order in the classroom," and for "supervising

the work" of the professors (kyoju^[*] ), assistant professors (jokyoju^[*] ), dormitory masters, and clerks attached to his school. Each college had several departments (gakka —for instance, English law, French law, and politics in the Law College), and in 1893, Education Minister Inoue Kowashi introduced the koza^[*] (Lehrstuhl , or "chair") system in order that every major subject might be covered by an eminent scholar with sufficient funds, assistants, and prestige to devote himself wholeheartedly to his specialty. The need of the times, Inoue explained, was for the expert, not the amateur or jack-of-all-trades.

The central role of Todai in the development of Japan's higher education is underscored by the fact that, until the establishment of the second imperial university at Kyoto in 1898, it was the only recognized university in Japan. The ordinance of 1918, which finally granted university status to the private colleges and government higher technical schools in order to accommodate the swelling demand for higher education, also transformed Todai into a more unified, "comprehensive university" (sogo^[*] daigaku ), with the former colleges now becoming Faculties and their principals transformed into deans (gakubucho^[*] ). The University gradually won autonomy from the ministry, which gave it a greater cohesiveness than it had enjoyed in 1886, but to this day the Faculties have retained the basic identity and independence of the original colleges.

The graduate school, in Mori Arinori's original concept, was to stand above and apart from the colleges, and to coordinate research at the higher levels of all branches of learning. The idea of sharply differentiating teaching and research while maximizing the horizontal flow between various research facilities is one that has found favor with reformers again today. Inevitably, however, the vertical affinities within each discipline came to the fore. The research divisions, informally established in 1887, enabled the graduate student to spend two more years in his college before entering the graduate school proper, but after 1918 the graduate school became primarily a mechanism for administrative liaison. The postwar reforms revised the content and methods of graduate education in the direction of greater breadth of learning and more formal requirements (such as the accumulation of credits) but did not alter its structural grounding in the Faculty system.

The continuing hiatus at Todai between general and specialized education has deep historical roots in the fact that before the war the Japanese, like the major European nations, considered the university a place for professional (or at least academically specialized) training, with liberal or general education something to be fully mastered in the rigorous secondary courses of the kotogakko^[*] —the Japanese counterpart to the lycée, Gymnasium, or English public school. Both types of education before the war in Europe and Japan were for a limited elite. The introduction of general education into the university under the American occupation was redolent of an alien social system (if not of the dilatoriness of American

secondary education) and overlooked the fact that the prewar higher schools, while catering to the few, had provided imperial university students with an excellent general education.

In today's Japan, with the expansion and democratization of higher education, there is a general acceptance of the need for some sort of general education at the university level and for its meaningful integration with the specialized programs. At the time of the postwar reforms, however, Todai had no other choice than to accept a rather mechanical fusion with the general education program offered at Komaba, which, for all its changes, remains in many respects a yobimon , or preparatory department. For this there has been ample precedent. The Ministry of Education's Tokyo^[*] Eigo Gakko^[*] (English School) had been attached to the university and was officially known as the yobimon from 1877 to 1886. The state-operated higher schools established by Mori (and supplanting the yobimon ) were intended to serve as terminal secondary schools as well as to provide preparation for the university; but they soon confined themselves to the second function. The seven top-ranking higher schools before the war prepared exclusively for the neighboring imperial university, and the curriculum at the old First Higher School at Komaba dovetailed smoothly into the several Faculties at Todai.

Todai Today:
Patterns and Problems

The main structural components of Todai today are its ten Faculties, fourteen research institutes, the graduate school, and the administrative office (jimukyoku ) that serves the university as a whole. There are also six research facilities for joint interfaculty or interuniversity use, including the Joint Nuclear Energy Research Center and two computer centers.

Both in the breakdown and arrangement of fields of learning and in the relative importance of successive levels of administration, there are significant departures from the usual American pattern. In the United States, at the larger Ivy League schools and at most state universities, there are traditionally several fields such as law, medicine, or business that are strictly professional and reserved for the graduate level. They are organized as separate schools, which possess their own full set of administrative organs, are subject in the final instance to control by the president and board of trustees, and are generally closed to undergraduates. Even where undergraduates may attend lectures, they are enrolled in their own undergraduate college, where the full roster of humanities and social and natural sciences is organized under a Faculty (or School) of Arts and Sciences, divided into departments of roughly equal standing (though not size), which offer a variety of courses—the menu shifting with the availability and preferences of the staff or with student demand. These departments also offer graduate training in fields not represented by the professional schools and cooperate in a variety of interdisciplinary

programs at the graduate, undergraduate, and general-education levels. Each department, under its chairman, exercises general control over the development of its own program and has the primary say in appointments, but matters of a campus-wide nature are taken up at meetings of the entire arts and sciences faculty, in which professors more often act as individuals rather than as representatives of their own departments. The structure here is flexible and permits a high degree of lateral exchange and contact between specialized fields.

At Todai the articulation of fields is very different. What would be professional graduate schools in America—the Faculties of Law, Medicine, Education, Pharmacology (and in many cases Engineering and Agriculture)—at Todai enroll primarily third-and fourth-year undergraduates. Students are now earmarked for their Faculties upon joining the university and begin preparing for them actively during their second year at Komaba. A premedical student (as he would be called in America) studies not in the biology or biochemistry department of the Science Faculty (which trains only pure scientists) but in the medical department of the Faculty of Medicine. And the education major, although entitled to attend lectures in other Faculties, will rarely do so and will be deep into his specialty of educational psychology or school administration by his third year.

The other familiar departments of the typical American arts and sciences faculty are scattered throughout the remaining three Todai Faculties of Economics, Science, and Literature (the bungakubu , perhaps best translated as humanities or liberal arts), in various shapes and sizes. Economics rates an entire Faculty, albeit a small one. Politics (or government) crops up as one of the three courses (kosu^[*] ) that constitute the Law Faculty, reflecting the traditional role of the Law Faculty since 1887 as the seedbed of Japan's higher civil service. The former departments of sociology, anthropology, and psychology within the Literature Faculty simply appear as course offerings or as seminars (kenkyushitsu^[*] ) under one of the four broad areas (rui ) into which the Literature Faculty recently has been divided: cultural studies (primarily philosophy), history, language and literature, and psychology and sociology. The social sciences have been cited here because their mutual isolation at Todai is particularly striking.

Neither do the various administrative levels at Todai necessarily correspond to those at most American institutions, despite the similarity of names. The Faculties are the main administrative entities, but in terms of scope the three we have just mentioned obviously fall somewhere between an American faculty of arts and sciences and an ordinary American department. The Faculties at Todai are further subdivided into departments (gakka ), but these too are highly variable units: the Engineering Faculty, for instance, has twenty; the Medical Faculty only two, although it enrolls nearly one-third as many students as engineering. In the Science

Faculty, the departments represent familiar fields such as mathematics, physics, and chemistry, but in the Economics Faculty (as in Pharmacology and Medicine) they are virtually synonymous with the Faculty itself. Economics has only the two departments of economics and business management.

Below the department, finally, come two smaller structural units. The basic element for budgeting and staffing at Todai is the chair (koza^[*] ). Engineering, for instance, has 163 chairs, law 51, literature 54, and science 76. In several faculties two or more chairs are grouped together in a number of seminars (called either kenkyushitsu^[*] in literature, for instance, or kyoshitsu^[*] in science and medicine—both terms are best translated as "research room" or "Seminar" in the German usage). The effective operating unit varies greatly from one Faculty to another. Where the Faculty has no departments, as in the Law Faculty, or where the departments are of a nonfunctional, catch-all nature, as in economics, the individual chair must be reckoned with in intrafaculty deliberations. Where there are many chairs but few departments, as in the Medical or Science Faculties (with respective ratios of 49:2 and 76:8), the seminar seems to gain operational weight. The department, however, is more important than the seminar in Faculties where there are few chairs, and where the departments themselves correspond closely to well-defined, traditional disciplines. This holds for the Education Faculty (with a 15:5 chair-to-department ratio) and the Literature Faculty (where the ratio is 54:18). In the latter, the present-day seminars are in effect the former eighteen departments in a new guise, and so they remain the effective subdivision of the Faculty.

The new postwar national universities have been established on the more familiar departmental model, without the chairs, which remain a distinctive feature of the eight former imperial universities—a distinction that helps perpetuate the gap in prestige and budgeting largesse between the older and the newer schools. More aptly (if somewhat facetiously) described as a "sofa" than a "chair," the koza is a unit for instruction in a given subject up through the doctoral level. It is staffed by a prescribed and uniform complement of one full professor, one associate professor, and one research assistant (joshu )—or two of the latter in subjects involving experimental laboratory work. The research assistant functions variously as a laboratory teaching assistant in science, engineering and medicine; as a prestigious, full-time research fellow in law; and as an instructor and often as not as a personal aide to his professor in literature.

The budgetary allocation from the Ministry of Education is identical for all chairs within each of three categories: those with laboratory work (jikken koza ), those without laboratory work (hijikken koza ), and those with clinical work (rinsho^[*] koza ). Since the funding for experimental chairs is approximately four times that for nonexperimental chairs, great efforts are made to get new chairs identified as experimental chairs, especially in

borderline cases. In any event, the allocation is for the chair as a unit, and in Faculties where the chairs are especially strong, the funds are placed entirely in the hands of the senior professor to use at his own discretion for research and teaching purposes. This money, commonly called research expenses (kenkyuhi^[*] ), comes from the budgetary category known as "integrated school expenses for teachers" (kyokan^[*] atari sekisan kohi^[*] ) and is in addition to the professor's own salary as a civil servant, which derives from "personnel expenses" (jinkenhi ) in the budget.

Although there are minor variations (chairs that stop at the masters' level, or the undergraduate course—kamoku —structure at Komaba), the doctoral chair remains the basic building block at Todai and contributes to the rigidities and lack of horizontal mobility in Todai's structure—what Professor Eto^[*] Shinkichi has called the "petrification" and "octopus" effects. The chair, once it has been established, is permanent, and its creation and abolition is an elaborate process involving the consent of the Faculty, the university, the Ministry of Education, and ultimately the Ministry of Finance. The vested interest in established chairs is enormous. The chair allocation, however, prescribes fixed and uniform amounts for closely defined academic fields, without regard to the varying competence of teachers, the shifting demands of the students, the needs of society, or advances in human learning. The only way to get the money to keep abreast of new developments or strike out into new areas is to create new chairs for them.

Once established in his chair, the chief tends, in the words of two Todai professors (Nakamura Takafusa and Kumon Shunpei) to become "the absolute monarch of his little universe." He retains a free hand regarding standards, the content of lecture courses and research, and the duties of his subordinates. As a civil servant, he cannot be fired for incompetence and holds his position—blocking the advancement of lower staff—until he retires (at age sixty), dies, or resigns. His subordinates are beholden to him for their appointments, his ordinary pupils are beholden for proper introductions and placement in the outside world after graduation, and his graduate students generally fit their own research into that of the chair. Accordingly, the chairs (or the multiple-chair seminars, or small-scale departments in certain faculties) tend to become closed, highly specialized baronies competing with one another for money, space, and equipment—but there is little intellectual competition.

Graduate training at Todai gets short shrift. The student's own interests often do not coincide with the research priorities of the chair, and there is the almost universal necessity for part-time employment (arubaito ). Graduate fellowships from the government or university are few, salaries for the young research assistants are niggardly, and there are no university scholarships for study abroad. Professors teaching at the graduate level belong either to the Faculties or to the research centers, and devote their primary energies to undergraduate teaching or center work. The graduate

school has no plant, library, faculty, administrative staff, or budget of its own. It is, in fact, no more than a framework for sorting out graduate students into appropriate degree programs.

The graduate school consists of ten research divisions which correspond to the ten Faculties except for the College of General Education, which is not represented, and the excision of sociology from the Humanities Research Division (the graduate extension of the literature Faculty) to make the tenth division. Each research division offers several specialized courses of study (senmon katei ), which correspond to departmental or other subdivisions in the appropriate "servicing" Faculty (sewa gakubu ), and are taught by senior professors from the sewa gakubu with occasional assistance from members of other Faculties or research institutes. The funding of graduate training depends entirely on how the senior professor chooses to divide his chair money between his Faculty and graduate-school activities. The Graduate School Council (Daigakuin Iinkai), convened and presided over by the president, includes the chairman and two elected members of each research division committee (kenkyuka^[*] iinkai ). These chairmen are without exception the deans of the corresponding Faculties, with the result that the Graduate School Council simply repeats the existing faculty rivalries and has virtually no role in university-wide decisions.

Another, and very basic, weakness of the graduate divisions is that they train exclusively for academic careers—in effect for the replenishment of the Faculties—and therefore lack the leaven that comes with training students for careers in the outside world. The graduate school is viewed as an extension of the undergraduate course—an extension preferably avoided by those anxious to get ahead in their careers. Many government bureaus and large private companies now provide better graduate-level training for their own researchers and other staff than the universities—including Todai in some fields—and there is a peculiar shunning of advanced academic degrees as a handicap to career advancement by young men headed for business or government work.

Not only in graduate-type training but in research as well much of the best work in Japan today is being performed at government- and business-operated research centers outside the university system. This is part of the price now being paid for decades of emphasis on practical application and immediate technological return at the expense of basic research. The funding of all research at Japan's universities today amounts to less than that of the business-supported centers. Todai has the finest facilities in the country taken as a whole (its fourteen research centers include the Institutes for Medical Science, Earthquake Research, Oceanography, Far Eastern Culture, Social Science, Newspaper Research, Historical Compilation, Industrial Technology, Applied Microbiology, Solid State Physics, Aeronautics and Space, Cosmic Ray Observation, Research on the Atomic Nucleus, and the Tokyo Astronomical Observatory). The funding is better than for the chairs but is spotty in important

areas such as the humanities, social sciences, and basic science. Research at Todai suffers from the lack of a powerful graduate-school structure. The institute directors are not represented on the influential inner conclave known as the Deans' Conference (Gakubuchokai^[*] ) and the centers have often complained of their exclusion from the mainstream of Todai's decision-making process.

There is no reason why research activities should be confined to or even primarily conducted at university centers, and many of Japan's research needs promise to be adequately filled off-campus, subject of course to government and business priorities. What will increasingly suffer, however, from the skimping on university-centered graduate training and advanced research is the academic profession itself—that is, scholarship in the broader sense. The future quality of Japan's premier university is at stake when Todai professors can no longer compete with industry and bureaucracy for their own top students.

This disjunction between general and specialized education at Todai is not only curricular but physical as well. With half of the university's population crammed into its modestly expanded facilities at Komaba, halfway across the sprawling metropolis from Hongo^[*] , the College of General Education has found itself on the short end of money, space, facilities, library books, prestige, and general appeal ever since its establishment in 1949. Although some teachers from the main Hongo campus occasionally give "outside lectures" (mochidashi kogi^[*] ) at Komaba, the college has its own separate staff and resembles an American arts and sciences faculty, but caters only to the first two years. Many of the original college staff were carried over from the old higher school, where they had learned to teach from a broad, humanistic viewpoint but found themselves overwhelmed by numbers and by the inevitable debasement of standards. Professors in the Faculties at Hongo—like the students at Komaba—tend to view the two years in the college as a period of exile, which cuts into precious time needed for specialization and provides no more than an accumulation of fragmentary knowledge, much of which the student already has learned in high school.

There are, of course, sequential breaks between general and specialized education in the typical American pattern, but the sharpest disjunction (involving different administrative and curricular structures, and often a separate plant) falls between the undergraduate college and the professional graduate school rather than midway through the undergraduate course as at Todai. The American undergraduate enjoys far more flexibility in formulating his total program both forward and backward between introductory and advanced courses, and sideways among the various disciplines. A freshman or sophomore in good standing can often mix work toward a prospective major (which involves quasi-professional training in such fields as premedicine, engineering, education) with required "Gen-Ed" courses, while a senior is permitted to dip back into

elementary courses outside his chosen field in order to cultivate late-blooming interests. During all four years, electives provide lateral mobility throughout the college, and the procedures for switching majors or degrees are relatively simple, with no more backtracking than is needed to make up the prerequisite courses.

At Todai, the applicant sits for only one of six possible entrance examinations covering six general areas: "Literature 1 (for law); "Lit. 2" (for economics); "Lit. 3" (for literature, education); "Science 1" (for physical, chemical and engineering sciences); "Sci. 2" (for biological and agricultural sciences); and "Sci. 3" (for medicine). If successful, he is already slotted for one or possibly two Faculties at Hongo^[*] before he even starts his studies at Komaba. Final Faculty assignment depends on his performance at the College of General Education. It is theoretically possible for the student to switch his area up to the middle of his second year, but barring an outstanding scholastic record, it is extremely difficult to shift targets, particularly from a less prestigious or popular Faculty to a more popular one or, for that matter, to get out of a slot for a prestigious Faculty (such as law) into one for a highly popular department of a less prestigious Faculty (such as sociology or psychology in the Literature Faculty). While at Komaba, the underclassman has no access to the regular departments or "star" professors at Hongo, while the upperclassman at Hongo has little practical leeway in his heavily specialized Faculty major for courses nominally available in other Faculties. In the extremely intensive scientific fields, it is simply a matter of time; in the humanities, more a matter of inclination, specifically of group feeling. As one Todai scholar has put it, "A student would feel lonely taking courses outside his own Faculty, away from his closest friends." If the would-be degree-switcher cannot effect his switch during his sophomore year, he has no other choice than to drop out altogether and sit for a new entrance examination in his preferred area, or graduate in his originally assigned Faculty and then take a special examination (gakushi nyugaku^[*] ) for admission to another Faculty at the third-year level. There is no switching of Faculties (which grant the degrees) once the student is at Hongo.

One exception to this pattern is the highly limited, prestigious four-year course at Komaba. The College now retains over two hundred honors students through their third and fourth years, awarding the bachelor's degree in its two departments of liberal arts and basic sciences. Any student is eligible on the basis of his first- and second-year record. The production of graduates has given the College a taxonomical equality with the other Faculties, and the tiny minority of undergraduates who do remain for the flexible but well-integrated four-year course experience something roughly similar to an undergraduate education on an American campus. As a new and less prestigious Faculty, however, the College of General Education is more malleable to the wishes of the administration and suffers from a very weak voice in university decision-making.

The College at Komaba was established in response to the greatly felt need after World War II for an infusion of general education into Japan's university curriculum, and under the vision and strong leadership of President Yanaibara Tadao, Tokyo University went further than any of its sister institutions in implementing the general education concept. The Komaba "experiment" remains a distinctive feature of Todai, but what successes it has achieved have been bought at the price of sundering the undergraduate experience, both social and intellectual, at the midriff.

Decision-Making:
Autonomy Versus Administrative Efficiency

The inability of Todai to take practical measures for reform from within is simply the latest symptom of the increasing paralysis of the university's decision-making processes. These processes display in a more extreme form features often found in Japanese decision-making, such as the preponderant weight of lower strata, the existence of figurehead entities toward the top, the osmosis of consensus from the bottom upwards, the principle of unanimity rather than majority rule, and the long strung-out shingikai hoshiki^[*] (deliberative consultation method). When it comes to consensus and decisions, Todai is a bowl full of jelly.

This state of affairs derives primarily from a weak university administration caught between the autonomy of a powerful faculty, with their own chairs, and a powerful Ministry of Education, which controls the budget and to a significant degree runs the university. The potential leverage of the Japanese state through finances has evoked a strong defensive reaction under the banner of university and Faculty autonomy, and in recent years the requirements of university administrative efficiency have been sacrificed to this pressure for autonomy.

For the modernizing Meiji state of 1886, national administrative efficiency came first, under the tight control of the Ministry of Education and of its proconsul, the president. By 1918 Todai had achieved a large measure of autonomy from the state, with the president now representing the university to the ministry as primus inter pares of the academic staff. Before World War II the major points at issue concerned the relation of Todai to the world outside, and the president generally enjoyed strong and cohesive support in his efforts to guard the university's autonomy against the pretensions of an increasingly totalitarian state. Since the war, with a fresh measure of independence from the ministry, the focus of attention at Todai has shifted inward toward the internal adjustments required first by Occupation policy and more recently by the momentous changes in Japanese society. The system, which had worked reasonably well before the war, broke down as the effective locus of autonomy itself shifted from the university to its component parts.

Complicating the decision-making process, meanwhile, is the fact that it

remains a clumsily joined composite of two very different systems, which neither singly nor together are equal to today's needs. One is the typically authoritarian pattern (largely Western in inspiration) of direct ministerial control, dating from 1886. There are important residual elements of this, particularly in the area of budget-making and in the operation of the university's administrative services. The other is the typically Japanese pattern, with the features we have mentioned, which governs the relations among the various component units of the university itself. The aspect of upward osmosis is especially evident in the selection of new chairs in the annual budget requests, while deliberative consultation and unanimity figured heavily in the recent discussions of the Reform Chamber (Kaikakushitsu). The Central Council for Education (Chuo^[*] Kyoiku^[*] Shingikai), finally, has made proposals that attempt to improve internal cohesion and administrative efficiency while securing the independence of the university from political control or intervention by the state.

The Historical Background

A high degree of Faculty autonomy over matters such as curriculum, staff appointments, and the selection of university officials has been a traditional feature of university systems operated by the state, as in Germany and other continental countries. With money and basic policy both controlled by the government, academic affairs represented the only area in which the community of scholars could exercise independence, and they have claimed it to the hilt. In this area, as a matter of fact, they enjoy more freedom from their own founding or administrative authorities than the teaching staffs of the private or locally operated universities of the American tradition—where boards of trustees, churches, regents, and governing corporations retain considerable power of intervention in matters of instruction and personnel.

Japan's opting in mid-Meiji for a state-run university system on the German-French model was perhaps inevitable given the limited resources of the central treasury, the need for strong national leadership, and the precedent of placing the nation's leading schools of Western learning under direct control of the Shogunate government in Edo. The trend among the Western democracies, however, has been to approximate the ideal already realized by Britain and many of the American state universities of "support without control," whereby funds from the treasury are turned over to an autonomous body such as the University Grants Committee in Britain, which includes university-related members, makes the allocations entirely as it sees fit, and is not even required to report to Parliament. Japan has been slow to follow this trend, and there has been a tenacious resistance to the idea—now, as right after the war, when the Occupation promoted it—of an independent body including nonacademic members standing between the government and the universities them-

selves. There is the underlying fear that, given the lack of a strong liberal tradition in Japan, such a body would rapidly become the handmaiden of the state and prove responsive to various political forces. And at Todai there is a more subtle reason for resistance: the reluctance to forfeit the patronage and prestige it enjoys as the capstone of the state educational system.

In 1886, decision-making worked downwards from the ministry through the president, a man who was chosen for his administrative talents (in 1886 it was Watanabe Kyoki^[*] , ex-governor of Tokyo; from 1905 to 1912 Hamao Arata, who had been a ministry bureaucrat since 1872). The man was dispatched from the Ministry of Education, not elected by Todai, and held a tight rein over the principals (in effect deans) of the several colleges. The principals, although professors, were also appointed by the minister and exercised real authority in their respective colleges. The arrangements in 1886 also provided for a senate (Hyogikai^[*] )—composed of the principals and two professors (selected, again by the ministry) from each college, and presided over by the president—to be the highest deliberative council in the university.

Mori Arinori's system met with resistance and calls for greater independence from the very start—beginning with Kato^[*] Hiroyuki's refusal to continue his services as president—and in 1893 the seeds of autonomy were firmly planted. In that year, under Inoue Kowashi, the senate was given fresh powers which gradually enabled Todai to have its own way in curriculum and personnel matters, and which made the senate in effect the university's supreme decision-making as well as deliberative organ. The president was no longer required to report the senate's deliberations to the minister, nor permitted to convene the senate on the ministry's premises; and he was ordered to drop his ex officio function as principal of the Law College with its powerful ties to the government bureaucracy. The professorial representatives in the senate were now elected by their colleagues, and the senate was empowered to create and abolish departments within the several colleges; to recommend the fields of Inoue's new chair system; to make university regulations on its own initiative or present proposals to the ministry where special ministerial decrees were required; and to grant degrees.

The Faculty councils officially established in each of the colleges in 1893 also weakened the ministry's grip on the university. Regular membership was restricted to full professors, but assistant professors and lecturers (koshi^[*] ) could also attend at the discretion of the principal, who chaired the meeting. The Faculty councils were empowered to discuss curriculum, examinations, and degree requirements, and by 1914 had won primary say in the teaching appointments in their own colleges.

In 1907, the Imperial Universities Special Account Law (Teikoku daigaku tokubetsu kaikeiho^[*] ) set aside certain amounts of money for the imperial universities each year and gave them full responsibility for

making budgetary allocations from this source—which included income from capital investments, tuition fees, gifts, and treasury grants. The final step toward prewar autonomy was taken in 1915, when Kyoto Imperial University elected one of its own professors as president—strictly speaking, a nomination requiring the minister's approval. By 1920, the precedent had become the rule at the state universities, and the ministry has never vetoed a Todai nomination. Deans, too, were now similarly chosen by their own Faculties, with pro forma approval of the ministry.

After 1918, decision-making at Todai worked upwards from the former colleges—now the Faculties—to the president, who now represented the university to the ministry as the spokesman for his own peers. The effort to protect the autonomy of the campus in an era of rampant thought control was conducive to intramural cooperation and effective leadership from the president. The ministry, however, retained important powers of inspection and the specifically stated right of control (kantoku ).

The Occupation reforms reduced the powers of the ministry without, however, supplying clear-cut procedures to govern the relations between the universities and the government or spell out the lines of authority and formalize relations between the divisions within a single university. The basic legislation needed to fill this gap has been shelved by the Diet ever since the early 1950s. The LDP, from the Ikeda administration onward, has tended to link its calls for tighter university control with attacks on the leftist bias of the professors; and the academic profession has responded by opposing almost any sort of effective management as the thin edge of a totalitarian revival. The complete paralysis of the normal decision-making procedure in the violent upheaval of 1968–1969 was met with the Temporary Universities Control Law of August 1969, which only postponed real reform. In the meantime, it has become virtually an article of faith that university autonomy from the government is best preserved by the autonomy of the individual Faculty—which is borne out neither by logic nor by the historical record.

Residual Powers of the Ministry

The Ministry of Education Establishment Law of 1949 confined the ministry's function to counseling, coordinating, and assisting universities. At Todai and the other state universities, the ministry retains the right to approve promotions of staff and the appointments of teachers, deans, and presidents, but in practice follows the university's own recommendations. It also has the right to determine staff qualifications, pay schedules, student fees, and the budget; to establish new Faculties, institutes, and chairs; to set standards for graduate training and degrees; to fix staff-student and graduate-undergraduate ratios and specify the budgetary allocation per student (thereby influencing the size of enrollments); and has the ultimate right to establish or abolish the institutions themselves.

The possibilities for direct intervention or policy control by the ministry since the war have been severely limited, although the new national universities established after the war bend more easily to the ministry's will than the proudly independent former imperial schools. The powers that are not nominal are passive and serve a limiting function. The only way, for instance, that the ministry could pressure Todai and other state schools to bring order to the campuses in 1969 was to have the Diet pass the Temporary Control Law, which threatened the universities with closure or, if that failed, dissolution.

The ministry, nevertheless, retains considerable leverage at Todai through negotiations over the budget and the running of the university's administrative office. The fact that money from the central treasury is released today directly through the Ministry of Education rather than through an independent body as in Britain, and the fact that officials from the ministry still run the university's administrative services, go a long way to explain the teaching staff's lingering fear of political control and its tenacious clinging to the doctrine of autonomy. The academic staff remains highly sensitive to anything reminiscent of the thought control of the 1930s, and views the ministry's effective control of money and other residual powers as the loosely hinged door to a Pandora's box of totalitarian repression. The government bureaucracy, for its part, remains reluctant to relinquish control over funds and policy to the institutions, which it considers not only administratively incompetent but also ideologically given to leftist, antigovernment postures.

The financing of Japan's national universities is a murky business for anyone unfamiliar with the chair structure, or untutored in the backstage negotiations during the budget-making process. It is one of the great ironies of the postwar reform that the Special Account Law was rescinded in 1947, depriving the national universities of their independent budget management and throwing them back on the annual approval of the Ministries of Education and Finance for their allocations.

Since salaries and research expenses are geared to the chair system, the only way a university can get more money for either new or existing fields is to petition the ministry in its annual budget request for the creation of new chairs. Each level, from the departments through the faculty councils and the university president, in consultation with the heads of the administrative office (jimukyokucho^[*] ) and its accounting bureau (keiribucho^[*] ), annually discusses and sets priorities for new chairs. When the Ministry of Education receives the university's priorities in the form of its annual budget request, it sets them in line with its own policy and submits the list to the Ministry of Finance (Okurasho^[*] ).

This annual scramble for more chairs represents the only occasion for anything resembling the consideration of a university-wide policy on education and research. The processing of the individual chair application may take as long as five years, with the liveliest point of contention usually

being whether the chair should be designated as experimental or nonexperimental—since the research expenses for the former are so much greater than for the latter. Once a label is applied at one school, it sticks for any similar chairs in the national university system.

Certain budgetary allocations are fixed. The chair structure determines the number of salaries, and the appropriate civil service grades set salary levels. The minor category of "integrated school expenses for students" (gakusei atari sekisan kohi^[*] ) is likewise not open to negotiation, since it is predetermined by the number of students.

Apart, therefore, from requests for major expansion of physical plant, most of the annual budget-bargaining concerns the actual disposition of research expenses, which nominally should go in full amount to the heads of chairs for their research and teaching needs. As a matter of fact, a certain proportion of the research expenses (I have heard estimates ranging from 5 to 10 percent) are siphoned off at each succeeding administrative level—ministry, university, Faculty, department—for plant maintenance and other administrative expenses, leaving the chair professor at the end of the line with considerably less than his original allocation. The portion withheld by the Ministry of Education from the MOF appropriation is a point of negotiation between the Ministry of Education and the universities, and provides the former with important leverage. The apparent reason for this practice is the inadequate provision for property expenses (bukkenhi ) and administrative expenses (jimukyoku keihi ) in the annual budgets. Property expenses, including maintenance and operation of the existing plant, are pegged to a table of expenditures that is uniform for all government bureaus—and that overlooks, for instance, the whopping electricity bills run up by some of Todai's experimental laboratories. Therefore, there is pilfering from research expenses as the money is passed down through the administrative channels to pay for lighting, heating, repairs, and the ordinary running of administrative offices. There is nothing the academic staff can do about it except bargain for the least injurious settlement. This places a high premium on choosing deans and presidents who can "get the budget" within the rigid and unresponsive financing system.

Since the administrative staff members are employed directly by the Ministry of Education and few of them are specialists in the administration of higher education, the teaching staff must assume much of the actual administrative work. The situation further confuses functions already badly scrambled by administrative office leverage—through budget-making—on academic programs and planning. The director of the administrative office is a powerful figure, who serves under the president but is responsible to the minister. He takes charge of business, financial, and to some extent student affairs, and he sits in Todai's two highest councils—the senate and the deans' conference. The administrative staffs at the Faculty and departmental levels also tend to side with the ministry

against the university, and to be jealous of their own bureaucratic prerogatives.

The Intramural Decision-Making Process

What the academic staff at Todai has lost in budgetary powers, it has perhaps more than recouped by its firm grip on teaching and appointments. A typical American university would respond more rapidly and flexibly to reasonable budgetary requests from the teaching side, but there would also be a greater chance for the administration and faculty as a whole to impose a chosen and coordinated educational policy on the university's various subdivisions.

At Todai the downward flow of the ministry's budgetary powers and the upward filtering of educational and other campus policies are not only poorly meshed. The latter also tends to fall apart in a decision-making process where authority is fragmented and has gravitated steadily toward the bottom; where individual Faculties retain an effective veto over university-wide decisions; and where consensus within the Faculty itself is little more than an amorphous confluence of the wills of individual professors, or of small, tightly-knit, intra-Faculty groups. Although the relative importance of the departments, seminars, and chairs varies considerably from one Faculty to the next, the effective decision-making (or blocking) power tends to lie with one or the other of the sub-Faculty groups.

The chair has become the most basic unit of autonomy within Todai today. The senior chair professor, with his subordinates roped in by a web of personal obligations and unremovable himself, exercises the preponderant power in intra-Faculty deliberations. He is also eligible for the position of subdivision chief, which is either assigned on a seniority basis or rotated among the heads of the constituent chairs. If temperamentally so inclined, the department or seminar head can be a formidable figure in Faculty deliberations. Although not formally binding, decisions at the department or seminar level are generally respected when the formal decisions are taken by the Faculty council.

In Faculties where the departments are powerful, for example, all important questions are first hammered out in departmental meetings; and especially in the selection of teaching staff, other departments will never veto the choice of the department that has the vacancy. A retiring senior professor is consulted about his possible successor, but as a rule he is excluded from the Faculty committee that makes the final decision.

To be precise, the Faculty council is the faculty meeting in each Faculty—since there is no regular meeting of the entire professorial staff at Todai. Each Faculty has its own rules of procedure, but at Todai all Faculty councils include both senior and junior professors, and in most the lecturers as well. In addition to electing their own deans, the Faculty

councils make the official nominations for staff positions, formulate the Faculty's budget request, and lay down rules affecting admission, graduation and credits. In the larger Faculties, the councils operate of necessity on a subcommittee basis, but in the smaller Faculties, or where the issue is of unusual importance, individual professors are reluctant to delegate their personal powers, throwing the council into time-consuming plenary sessions without the benefit of subcommittee work or referral to purely administrative echelons. The need to discuss many (and often trivial) issues in great (and often personal) detail immobilizes Faculty-wide decisions, widens existing divisions by inflaming latent jealousies, and drives the sub-Faculty groups into a conspiratorial, secretive frame of mind through this constant threat of exposure. Decision-making, accordingly, starts off badly hobbled at the Faculty level. And even when the respective Faculties do reach an internal consensus, "Faculty autonomy" often blocks the way to university-wide decisions.

Nominally, it is the senate that formulates university policy and functions as the supreme decision-making organ. Todai's senate today consists of the president (as chairman), the deans and two professors elected from each of the ten Faculties, the directors of the research institutes, the chairmen of the ten divisional research committees of the graduate school, and the head of the administrative office. The prerogatives of the senate look impressive on paper, and include the creation, amendment, and abolition of university regulations; approval of the budget; the establishment of Faculties, departments, and other facilities; the determination of personnel standards and student numbers; the setting of policy on student affairs; the coordination of Faculties and institutes; and the discussion of matters affecting the administration of the university as a whole. Decisions must be carried unanimously and any Faculty or institute can exercise an effective veto simply by absenting itself from the meeting.

The senate, however, is a purely ornamental assemblage that does little more than rubber-stamp decisions taken by the deans' conference, an informal conclave with no basis in formal laws or regulations which exercises the only effective campus-wide authority at Todai. Since the deans act strictly as the spokesmen for their own Faculties, however, any decisions of the deans' conference reflect no more than an adjustment of individual Faculty positions, which leaves the ten Faculty councils as the most powerful voices in Todai's decision-making process. Here, as within each individual Faculty council, the lack of clear-cut statutory location of responsibility (as with a company president or a ministerial chief in the bureaucracy, whatever the informal consultation procedures of the business or government sectors) leaves decision-making at Todai at the mercy of unadulterated, consensus-style democracy: anybody can veto, nobody can decide.

The deans' conference (which dates from 1918) meets once every week

and includes the president, the ten Faculty deans, and frequently the administrative chief, who does not, however, join as a full-fledged member. The deans' conference functions as an advisory body to the president and as his channel of liaison with the Faculties, but in fact discusses and holds a veto over all major administrative decisions. The president cannot move without the support of his deans, yet the deans must constantly refer matters back to the Faculties that elected them to represent their interests. The inability of the university to go against a single Faculty in the larger interest was dramatically exposed when former President Okochi^[*] Kazuo in March 1968, respecting the autonomy of the Medical Faculty, passed on to the Senate for approval without emendation that Faculty's prescription for punishing some of its own students in the fast-spreading dispute over a new internship system. Okochi himself considered the formula unfair and unwise, and inasmuch as the controversy had kindled violent student passions all over the campus it was clearly no longer a simple, one-Faculty affair. When the Senate backed up the Medical School, student militancy burst out in all the other Faculties. A solution was finally reached for ending the confrontation with most of the students, but this was achieved through the strong initiatives of the new president, Kato^[*] Ichiro^[*] , backed up against his deans and other faculty opposition by the new President's Office (Sochoshitsu^[*] ) set up in 1969.

The President's Office is a genuinely advisory staff of capable and trusted lieutenants, who help prepare policy options. It was able to move most effectively during the extreme crisis mood of 1969, and it has been able to speed up decisions in areas that do not pit it directly against important Faculty interests—such as a highly adroit mediation of an intramural dispute at the Microbiology Institute. But its creation has been resented by the traditional seats of power, and it cannot go against real opposition from the Faculties. Moreover, it operates mainly in areas that the deans' conference has left to others.

Under the present system the most important factor in moving matters toward a decision is the personal effectiveness of the president in dealing with his deans, and, to a lesser degree, of the deans in dealing with their professors. Any professor may be elected dean, and the deans—who serve only two years as a rule—are almost always glad to be rid of a chore that deprives them of nearly all time for their own study and research.

By contrast, until 1972 the president was elected for four years and if reelected served another two years. Today he is restricted to one four-year term. Chosen by his own peers, the president of Todai needs special talents and qualifications in order to succeed as a prophet in his own country. Traditionally these have included an outstanding reputation as a scholar; the ability to move with ease among and command the respect of Japan's bureaucratic, political, and social elite; and of course, managerial and negotiating skills for dealing with the ministry as well as his own teaching staff. In the past the presidents of Todai have been men of national stature

and fairly advanced in years. According to some sources, President Kato^[*] was handicapped by his youth (he was the first president ever to be referred to in the familiar mode, as "Kato-kun"^[*] ), while his predecessor, Okochi^[*] , reportedly suffered from being insufficiently well known.

Todai has its own unique and traditional formula for electing presidents. It is the only occasion where the teaching staff participate in a university-wide, majority-type decision free of the usual Faculty barriers. All senior and junior professors participate in the vote, and lecturers may possibly be admitted in the near future. As the first step, seven delegates from each Faculty, and three from each institute, meet to put up names for nomination. The names are submitted anonymously on slips of paper and are written on an enormous horizontal banner. Any Japanese citizen is eligible—but the first round invariably produces a few tongue-in-cheek nominations which have included Eisenhower, Stalin, and the popular singer Miss Misora Hibari. The delegates then vote on the list and report the top five without tallies. Finally, the entire professorial body votes but is not restricted to this slate of five. Since no candidate has ever secured a majority on the first vote, there is inevitably a run-off between the top two.

One final element in the university's decision-making process are the commissions (iinkai ), which have been established from time to time both before and after the war to deal with problems of unusual magnitude, such as university reform. They operate under the president in a purely advisory capacity, however, and cannot execute their recommendations without the approval of the senate, which in the end means the approval of the individual Faculties. Their procedure often follows the deliberative consultation method, where great numbers of people explore and discuss a problem in great detail only to create proposals which are less decisions, really, than a summary of the elements that went into the final, vaguely worded consensus.

Good examples of the commissions in operation were provided by the faculty study groups for university reform set up in response to the violent campus disturbances of 1968–1970. The Preparatory Investigation Commission for Reform (Kaikaku Junbi Chosakai^[*] ), established in January 1969 while police battled radical students for control of the Hongo^[*] campus, produced a flurry of literature and proposals in record time in response to the crisis of the moment. As the sense of crisis waned, however, so did the interest in reform and the capacity to develop strong, broadly supported proposals. The Reform Commission (Kaikaku Iinkai), established in April 1970 to work out reforms in staff discipline, presidential elections, university structure, and student participation, originally suggested, for instance, a drastic reduction in the number of Faculties. The Reform Chamber set up in May 1971 to develop the recommendations of the Reform Commission, however, changed its mind by October 1972. Having obviously met determined opposition from vested Faculty interests, the chamber concluded that a few mammoth Faculties were perhaps

not such a good idea; that mammoth-, medium-, and mini-sized Faculties all had their merits and could be considered, but that it probably was best to work on a medium-sized model—all of which left no one badly bruised but brought the whole matter right back to square one. By 1973, with the crisis mood gone, talk of reform at Todai ground to a virtual halt. In the words of one Todai professor, "No fundamental changes can be expected short of another violent campus dispute, which we may get in another five years' time, but even then there probably will be many reports, but no serious action."

The Future of Todai

"The university will carry on as is, gradually disintegrating as good researchers abandon it for business and government institutes," says another Todai professor. "Eventually it will simply collapse—in about thirty years' time." There is an emphatic consensus that the government's sweeping proposals will fail at Todai.

Unlikely scenarios for Todai's future are contained in the recommendations of the university's own Reform Chamber—what Todai would do if it were able to move itself; and in the section on higher education in the final report (June 11, 1971) of the Central Council for Education—what would happen to Todai if a massive nationwide educational reform ever did get underway. These recommendations are summarized here, not as predictions for the future, but as present perceptions of the problems at hand.

With regard to the three basic structural problems of the Faculty-chair system, general education, and research, the consensus was reflected as follows in the May 1971 and October 1972 issues of Todai's reform newsletter, Kaikaku foramu^[*] :

1. There is a strong preference for making the department (with a staff of approximately twenty to forty) the fundamental unit of teaching and administration. The later report hedged earlier recommendations for abolishing the chairs, but there is agreement that the Faculties should be reduced in number and serve primarily to facilitate liaison between related departmental fields.

2. There is unanimous agreement that the horizontal rift between Komaba and Hongo^[*] should be eliminated; general education should not be abolished, but it must be integrated with the specialized courses by transferring responsibility for it to the several Faculties.

3. There are suggestions for subdividing the research institutes along quasi-departmental lines for closer articulation with the graduate school, and a pronounced aversion to seeing research facilities slip out from under university control.

The most difficult deliberations on reform have been those concerning structural renovation. Above all, no one at Hongo wishes to move to

Komaba, which will have to receive some of the restructured units if the General Education College is abolished and its courses are integrated vertically into the Faculty structure. The Reform Chamber has postponed a decision on the ostensible grounds that it cannot decide between a new highrise campus at Hongo^[*] , retaining the two old campuses, or rebuilding Todai from scratch in the country; but by 1973 the deliberations actually were stalled over the question of how to rescramble the various academic divisions.

The proposals of the Central Council for Education for the restructuring of Japan's higher education are far more drastic. The basic suggestion—to create five new types of mutually independent institutions, sharply differentiated in function—would largely do away with Todai as we know it today. In addition to junior colleges and technical colleges much on the present pattern, there would be new universities offering three parallel three-year programs (nonspecialized, academically specialized, and professional-occupational). New graduate schools would offer a two-to-three year master's-level program as well as mid-career training for the public in general. Research centers would provide training in advanced research and guidance for the doctoral degree.

The Central Council further proposes a rigid separation of teaching and research facilities and of their organizational structures in the interest of greater functional efficiency. One presumed benefit would be better teaching at both graduate and undergraduate levels. It emphasizes, however, that individual scholars should be allowed to engage in both teaching and research activities, and that there should be free movement of students, faculty members, and administrators (and where feasible, coordinated management) both vertically between different levels in close physical proximity and horizontally with other institutions of the same type. The formal distinction between general and specialized education would be abolished and the university would offer maximum flexibility in structuring multidepartmental programs to fit the individual student's need. The plan for new universities, which passed the Diet in September 1973, is aimed at correcting many of the problems cited here. Beginning with the new Tsukuba University, other national universities are to have more powerful central administrations, less rigid faculty procedures, and more flexibility in creating and disbanding research teams.

The new graduate school would aim to make advanced academic training attractive once again to the general public and to bring young scholars into greater contact with the nonacademic world. The research centers, finally, would have teaching staffs of their own, either independently or in affiliation with a graduate school, one of the existing on-campus research institutes, or even appropriate facilities in the business or government sector. Doctoral and advanced research would at last receive the guidance and funding it deserves, and the maximum interflow of

personnel and ideas between the research centers and other institutes would be encouraged without regard to the individual researcher's formal academic qualifications.

Structural reform would not of itself, of course, bring about any improvement in the decision-making process. Improved decision-making would require fundamental and clear-cut redefinitions of the lines of responsibility and authority, both between the Ministry of Education and the national universities, and within Todai itself. The new framework would have to provide concrete assurances of academic freedom while managing somehow to keep the normal Japanese propensities for factionalism within practical working bounds.

Todai's several reform study groups have not dealt with these fundamental questions of ministerial and intramural authority. The Central Council for Education, on the other hand, has presented two alternative plans for more effective administration free of both ministerial dictation and the trammels of a hypertrophic Faculty autonomy. One is to free the national universities entirely from the Ministry of Education by transforming them into public corporations, depending on the government only for a regular supply of funds—the British model, in short, but with a vague rider to the effect that the government would retain the right to decide whether each university corporation was "worthy of being granted public funds." The second choice would be to remain an agency of the government, with a new administrative organ within each university, which would include persons from outside the university community and would be given a greater range of authority over campus administration than is now the case, but would not carry the principle of autonomy from the government "beyond what it originally means."

Todai faculty are not happy with either proposal. Much depends on one's reading of the government's actual intentions. Many Todai professors fear that the government is not prepared to grant genuine financial autonomy on the British model and is, in fact, determined to maintain ultimate political control under one guise or another. There are also fears that, given the historical weakness of Japan's private sector in the face of government pressures, any laymen appointed to the governing board from outside the university would bend easily to bureaucratic and party-political pressures. Of course, what immediately skews any comparison with the British system is the extent to which the Japanese universities themselves have been politicized, and the depth of the ideological confrontation that divides government and academe in Japan. Of the two proposed alternatives, Todai probably would prefer the latter, inasmuch as it preserves a comfortable old dependency along with the strong likelihood that, whatever the new administrative devices, they will eventually succumb to the irresistible tug of autonomy.

Decision-making at Todai breaks down, in summary, at several levels and for several reasons. Basic is the pitting of the university's traditional

claims to autonomy against the financial prerogatives (and fear of political intervention) of the central government—a struggle played out against the extremely fuzzy postwar backdrop of minimal statutory guidance. The confrontation over prerogatives and ideology is carried onto the campus itself, where a jealous teaching staff hesitates to delegate business to the ministry's local administrative staff, who often are poorly trained in academic affairs. The lack also of legislation establishing a clear-cut chain of command within the university itself has left decision-making at this complex modern-day institution to find its natural level—which turns out to be something oddly reminiscent of the quasi-egalitarian consensus politics of the traditional Japanese village. We have traced the independence of the individual Faculties to various historical and structural circumstances. The heavy weight of even the lower echelons would seem to be the result, in part, of (1) the effective control of teaching appointments at very low, sub-Faculty levels; (2) the overload of nondelegated business that hamstrings the Faculty councils; and (3) the Japanese social and psychological structure. The chairs, seminars, and departments at Todai are examples of primary, face-to-face social groupings that have never been galvanized to common effort by the profit motives of Japanese industry, or by the effective regulatory framework or national-interest achievement orientation of the Japanese bureaucracy, and have been left by special historical circumstance to cultivate their lush sectionalistic egos in the hothouse of "university autonomy."

Despite all the organizational problems, where good teachers and students are gathered together good learning tends to override material or political obstacles. Organizational efficiency per se is no guarantee of good education. Todai continues to possess the best faculty and the most talented and highly motivated students in Japan. Public complaints about faculty diversions in writing and commenting on public affairs, and about the students' lack of interest in attending classes, apply far more to other, especially the private, universities than they do to Todai, where attendance rates remain relatively high, and where the faculty speaks and writes for the public less for the money than to enhance prestige, or because of a sense of cultural or political mission.

Todai's controversial role at the apex of Japan's academic and social pecking order is a problem that transcends mere organizational dysfunction. Pride and a sense of history do, of course, embolden Todai professors in their claims to autonomy. But some proponents of university reform seem to forget that it will take not only the universities alone but the efforts also of government, industry, and society at large to make any real dent in the hierarchical social patterns that have favored Todai—such basic changes start with the pattern for hiring university graduates.

During the late 1960s, Todai as a symbol of Japan's elitist establishment became the lightning rod for a bewildering complex of political, academic, and personal grievances among the younger generation, and it was only

natural that student protest should have turned its fury against an institution that was familiar, highly symbolic, and eminently vulnerable. The pressures of the campus upheaval would have placed the most efficient university administration under considerable strain, and at Todai, they penetrated like an x-ray to bring all of the organizational weaknesses into glaring relief.