For more than three decades, Sozaburo Okamatsu was a loyal company man in Japan Inc., occupying a succession of senior policymaking positions in the powerful Japanese Ministry of International Trade and Industry.
Today, Okamatsu heads a new Japanese think tank that wants to put Japan Inc. out of business and transform the government and business cultures that sustained it.
Teacher Martha Harris tells independent candidate Eugene Dewitt Kinlow about some of the problems she faces.
(Andrea Bruce Woodall -- The Washington Post)
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Last week, Okamatsu was making the rounds of major Washington think tanks to explain the ambitious agenda of the Research Institute of Economy, Trade and Industry (RIETI).
"We are trying to stimulate the government and the public to debate alternative public policy measures," Okamatsu said. "Our job is to find out how to renovate the government and the society."
The tank's mission is to pick intellectual fights with some of the most powerful and deeply entrenched institutions in Japanese life. Here are some of the changes it's advocating:
• University scholars and administrators should no longer be government employees, which would free scholars to criticize government policies.
• Sever the ties that bind local governments to the central government, thereby making local government "more responsive to its citizens."
• Transfer control of corporate policymaking in individual companies from the banks, where it traditionally has rested, to stockholders.
• Make companies more accountable to stockholders and less accountable to employees, changing the "job-for-life" mentality that critics say has helped to stifle economic growth in the 1990s.
The institute was once part of the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry (METI), which granted it independent status in April. Though RIETI employees are no longer government workers, its $18 million annual budget comes from Tokyo -- a tie that would seem to compromise its independent status. Okamatsu says he has been promised complete independence.
In Washington, he called on the heads of the Brookings Institution, the American Enterprise Institute and the Institute for International Economics. Okamatsu said he asked these top Washington thinkers what his fledgling tank could do to enhance its credibility with the public.
Easy, they said: "Criticize the government, criticize METI." Okamatsu laughed. "It was very good advice. We have already started that process."
