Bureaucracy in Japan is often past the point of foolishness - it is senseless & harmful.
Obedient bureaucrats are convinced if properly filling-in every box and recording each detail, they're doing a good job. But that process wastes huge amounts of time & energy with often no gain, and easily interferes with more important goals. The stubborn administrator looks at his or her small patch of "responsibility" and calmly watches society burn.
My lamented mentor, the late Prof. Hideo Sato (佐藤英夫
先生), often criticized Japan's bureaucracy in very negative ways. I'd believed then he overstated the problem. But now I wholly agree - and it's perhaps even worse these days as administrative systems are more rigid & ossified, and auditing more necessary.
Bureaucrats themselves are often nice people in a foolish situation, where a single largely irrelevant data point takes precedence over everything - no progress till corrected. There's no proportionality. Incompetence to a bureaucrat is "failure to collect all the paperwork"... When temporarily overruled so operations continue, the bureaucrat can be a distracting, haunting presence -- until page 7 question 66:d is properly dealt with. People should be better employed.
There are many ways to lampoon the bureaucrats, but it's better to warn policymakers of major potential problems with program implementation when fuck-headed idiots become the nation's guardians & gatekeepers.
(Personally I've not had any real problems, just foolishly wasted time. But the total of such foolishness must be multiplied by the 130 million Japanese sheeple = serious waste. Japan's bureaucracy is a parasite feeding off productivity & progress).
