Zeitschrift für Japanisches Recht
Heft Nr.13 / 7. Jahrgang 2002

System Change?
A New Perspective on Japan’s Administrative Procedure Law

Tom Ginsburg*

 

I.     Introduction

II.    Theories of Bureaucracy

1.     Rationalism
2.   Systems Theory and Organic Analogues
3.   Theories and the Problem of Bureaucratic Discretion

III.   Japanese Governance: Toward a Systems Perspective

1.   State-Centered Approaches
2.     Relational Administration

IV.   The New Administrative Procedure Law

1.   Politics
2.     Provisions
3.   Analysis
4.   Impact
5.   A Social Science Fiction: the APL as Tool of a New Judicial Activism?

V.    Japanese Administrative Law and Theories of Bureaucracy

1.     Weberian Approaches to Proceduralization
2.   Rational Choice and Proceduralization
3.   The Systems Approach

VI.   Conclusion

 

Abstract: Japan’s Administrative Procedures Law was passed in 1993 with much fanfare, but has not constituted a fundamental change in the system of Japanese postwar governance. This paper considers different theoretical approaches to understanding the passage of the Law, and draws loosely on systems theory to argue that the law constituted a response by the system to threats of external interference in closed patterns of communication.

If your time to die has come

and you die - very well!

If your time to die has come

and you don’t - all the better!

Zen Monk Sengai Gibon (1750-1837)[1]

They stab it with their steely knives,

but they just can’t kill the beast.

The Eagles (1970-82)[2]


*       Thanks to Machaela Hoctor, Greg Noble, Luke Nottage, Edward Rubin, Dimitri Vanoverbeke and Alex Ziegert for comments on this project at various stages.

[1]       Y. Hoffman (ed.), Japanese Death Poems 74 (1986).

[2]       “Hotel California“ (1976).