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TOKYO – Just two and a half weeks into his tenure as prime minister, a controversy already threatens to hurt Yoshihide Suga’s sky-high approval ratings.
The prime minister is tasked with appointing academics to the Scientific Council of Japan, which is established within the government but makes independent policy recommendations from it.
This would normally be a rubber stamp process, with the names proposed by the Council approved by the PM. Yet for the first time, Suga rejected six of the 105 names submitted this year, sparking an uproar that his government is restricting academic freedoms.
All six had come across Suga when he was Chief Cabinet Secretary expressing opposition to controversial policies in the past.
The government has refused to explain why the six scholars were rejected, despite requests for explanations from Council President Takaaki Kajita, who won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2015.
A minor protest, attended by about 300 people, broke out in front of the Prime Minister’s Office on Saturday (October 3).
But observers also noted that the treatment is in keeping with Suga’s reputation as the chief cabinet secretary of demoted bureaucrats who disagreed with him.
“The Suga administration does not seem very interested in liberalism, as seen by the refusal to appoint members,” Tokyo University political scientist Yu Uchiyama told the Sunday Times.
But on the other hand, Suga’s control over the bureaucracy could make him more adept at wiping out the reforms he wants and undoing practices that are leftover relics from the heady era of the Japanese bubble.
“I feel like awareness about the reforms is quite strong,” Dr. Sota Kato, research director of the Tokyo Foundation for Policy Research think tank, told the Sunday Times.
“The new prime minister will go to considerable lengths to improve productivity through regulatory reforms. He has the knowledge and the personal connections to eliminate resistance from business or other vested interest groups.”
One of those leading the charge is the minister of administrative reform, Taro Kono, a former minister of defense and foreign affairs, who wants to eliminate inkan or hanko stamps and fax machines that remain common.
Kono also led the charge last year to change the name order of Japanese names in English so that the surname is written first, as is the way they are presented in Japanese.
In advocating a reversal of government policy since the Meiji era (1868 to 1912), Mr. Kono argued that Chinese and Korean names are written in English just as they are read in their native languages.
What this means is that “Yoshihide Suga” should, in fact, be spelled as “Suga Yoshihide”, although the practice has been inconsistently adopted in the Japanese government, much less in the private sector.
But Kono could well be more successful with its push to eliminate stamps and fax machines, especially with the push to go paperless amid the Covid-19 pandemic.
Mr. Suga also appointed Japan’s Cabinet Digital Prime Minister, Mr. Takuya Hirai, who was ordered to create a digital agency to speed up inefficient bureaucracy.
Kono said at a press conference last month: “I don’t think there are so many administrative procedures that really need to print paper and fax.
“Why do we need to print paper? In many cases, it is simply because the hanko stamp is required. If we can end that culture, it will eliminate the need for paper, fax and stamps.”
He then said in a tweet on Friday (Oct 2): “We checked 800 most commonly used government procedures with hanko, or name stamp or seal, and found that few of them need to continue with hanko. This is the first step in doing those procedures. online “.
The experts were divided on the possibility of success, unless Suga intervenes with his influence.
Dr. Uchiyama told The Sunday Times: “Mr. Kono is very energetic, but I think the resistance is strong.”
Still, Dr. Kato said: “In the case of stamps, there are interest groups that are connected with members of the PLD (the ruling Liberal Democratic Party) and have hindered the reforms.
“But if it becomes an important agenda, it will be a numbers game and resistance from small interest groups can be overcome.”
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