The question at the beginning of the twenty-first century is: Can Japan change? The picture is not without hope. Japan has made abrupt about-faces, to the point of completely reinventing itself twice during the past 150 years, and could possibly do so again. But what if Japan cannot change? In seeking an answer, let's take another look at the bureaucracy.

Bureaucracy is the core institution of government, for its mission is to intelligently allocate the resources of the state. If it provides that service efficiently, it does its job. Japan's bureaucracy, riven with corruption and guilty of massive misallocation of funds in almost every area, fails this simple but crucial test. An indurated bureaucracy is Japan's single most severe and intractable problem, responsible for bringing the nation to the brink of disaster in the 1990s. The Ministry of Finance, for all its mistakes, is just one of many government agencies, and the damage it has done cannot compare with the Construction Ministry's burying the nation under concrete, the Forestry Bureau's decimating the native forest cover, the Ministry of International Trade and Industry's needlessly damming the Nagara River, or the Ministry of Health and Welfare's knowingly allowing 1,400 people to become infected with AIDS. So angry is the public that the last decade has seen bookstores overflow with books attacking officialdom, from Asai Takashi's 1996 best-seller, Go to Hell, Bureaucrats!, to Sumita Shoji's 1998 The Wasteful Spending of Officialdom. The public is ready for change.

During the past few years, it has become fashionable to speak of Japan's «three revolutions.» The first occurred after 1854, when Commodore Perry arrived with his «black ships» and forced the opening of Japan. Within twenty years, Japan discarded a system of feudal rule that went back almost eight centuries, replacing it with a modern state ruled by the army, wealthy businessmen, and government officials.

After the nation's defeat in World War II, a second revolution took place, under the guidance of General Douglas MacArthur and the U.S. Occupation. MacArthur dismantled the army and broke the power of the prewar capitalists – and in their place the bureaucracy took over, creating the Japan we see today.

It's now time, many believe, for a third revolution, which will differ from the previous two in one important way: pressure from foreign powers sparked both of the earlier revolutions; they did not spring from among the Japanese themselves. This time around, however, there is no foreign pressure. Nobody outside Japan is concerned about the fate of its mountains and rivers; nobody will arrive in a warship and demand that Japan produce better movies, rescue bankrupt pension funds, educate its children to be creative, or house its families in livable homes. The revolution will have to come from within.

It could. Dissatisfaction is rife, as may be gleaned from the many angry and frustrated people who are quoted in this book. Some readers might wonder how I can say such harsh things about Japan. But it is not I who say these things. Fukuda Kiichiro calls Japan a Kindergarten State, and Fukuda Kazuya asks, «Why have the Japanese become such infants?» Kurosawa proclaimed that Japanese film companies are so hopeless they should be destroyed. Asai Takashi titled his book Go to Hell, Bureaucrats! Nakano Kiyotsugu complains, «I don't know why, but invisible rules have grown up everywhere,» and Professor Kawai carries this much further in his report to the prime minister, declaring that Japan's society is «ossified,» and that conformity has «leached Japan's vitality.» Dr. Miyamoto Masao describes Japanese education as «castration»; Inose Naoki compares Japan's environmental ills and bad-debt crisis with the unstoppable march to war in the 1930s. The people of Kyoto rose up and fought the construction of the Pont des Arts. In short, there is a strong and vocal body of opinion within Japan that recognizes its troubles and is increasingly prepared to fight for change. In this lies great hope. The question is whether the mood of dissatisfaction will ever gain enough momentum to seriously affect Japan's forward course. One can make good arguments for revolution, and – sadly – even better ones for another decade or two of stagnation.

In the realm of politics, the early 1990s saw unprecedented anger within an electorate that was among the world's most docile. In 1993, the ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) lost its majority for the first time in forty years, and an opposition coalition, led by Prime Minister Hosokawa, took over briefly. The opposition, however, was no match for the bureaucrats. When Hosokawa sought financial information from the Ministry of Finance, the bureaucrats stalled, and there was nothing that the prime minister's office could do. Within six months, Hosokawa was out, and former members of the LDP, now scattered into a number of splinter parties, took over again. The electorate settled back into apathy, and at present the old LDP stalwarts are firmly back in power, beholden as before to bureaucrats and large businesses. In the political sphere, the score is Status Quo 1, Revolution 0.

One of the sharpest observations made by Karel van Wolferen is that the Japanese bureaucratic system has never relied on public approval for its legitimacy and power; it works in a separate dimension, far above and removed from the democratic process. As we have seen, even when voters do oppose ruinous construction projects and sign petitions requesting referendums, local assemblies are free to ignore them, and usually do. Outside observers see criticism in the media and hear complaints from average Japanese, and jump to the conclusion that these feelings will be translated into political action. The dissatisfied Japanese people are going to rise up and take matters into their own hands! But so far this has never happened.

Nevertheless, there is movement below the surface. Despite what Marxist theory tells us, the masses rarely start revolutions. The instigators tend to be the educated middle class and disgruntled low-level officials, what one might call «the soft underbelly of the elite» – and the soft underbelly is hurting. Since the publication of Lost Japan in Japanese, I am sometimes asked to speak on panels or write for specialist publications, even to act as a consultant to government agencies. What I have found is that the mid-levels of many organizations – mostly people in their forties – are disillusioned and frustrated by their inability to make changes. Mid-level disillusionment is a highly subjective area. There are no statistics on this subject, and elite-track officials and company employees don't write books and articles, which leaves me with very little in the way of published quotable material. I have only my own experiences to go by.

In 1994, I wrote an article lambasting the dreary displays and shoddy interiors of the Ueno National Museum. Soon afterward, at an opening, I met one of the top officials in the agency that runs the museum. He approached me, and I steeled myself for an angry denunciation of my article-only to hear him say that he personally thinks the mismanagement of Japanese museums is a disgrace. But despite his lofty position in the hierarchy there is little he can do. At the moment, the «soft underbelly» is hurting, but even elite managers are powerless against the inertia of their agencies.

The same official did manage to bring in a team of experts from the Smithsonian to give advice on modern museum management. To put most of that advice into practice he will have to wait – as enlightened middle-level bureaucrats and executives across Japan are waiting – for stodgy seniors to retire, or for their department to fall into such disarray that they can finally seize the initiative. This group of would-be reformers are like Madame Defarge in Dickens's A Tale of Two Cities, a secret revolutionary who sat for years in her tavern quietly knitting the names of hated aristocrats into her shawl. When the revolution finally came, she took her place at the foot of the guillotine, counting as the heads rolled. A lot of people in Japan are waiting to count heads.

You can hear the drumbeat of coming revolution in the rising level of anger in public opinion, fueled to a great extent by the sheer embarrassment of falling behind. There is considerable chagrin as the gaps between Japan and the United States, Europe, and newly wealthy Asian states widen. The thrust of the educational system is to make people highly competitive, and the hierarchical social structure gets people into the habit of ranking ethnic groups and nations as «higher» and «lower.» Naturally, they would like to stand at the top of the pyramid, and this leads to obsessive comparisons between Japan and other countries. This is where the frustration comes in.

When millions of Japanese travel abroad and return from Singapore's beautiful and efficient Changi Airport to the grim environment of Narita, the disparity is too strong to ignore. The decline of the Tokyo stock market, against a backdrop of explosive growth in New York and London, has been an agonizing spectacle for Japan's financial community. By the end of the century, Chinese-directed films featuring major Hollywood stars regularly took top spots in American box offices, and Chinese stars had become household names; in contrast, Japan's greatest success was Pokemon, a movie for ten-year-olds. The Japanese sense the contrast between the bright lights and excitement outside, and the mediocrity inside. They are embarrassed.

Yet while the groundwork exists, there is no assurance that the revolution will come. Against the dissatisfaction felt by the public is arrayed a complex system of bureaucratic control, infinitely more subtle than anything ever achieved in Russia or China in their Communist heydays. In order to visualize what is involved, let's do a «thought experiment» and ask ourselves what it would take to dismantle just a few bricks of the bureaucratic edifice – the system of licenses for aerobics instructors, for instance. The mind's screen goes blank, because the scenario whereby the Japan Gymnastics Association, the Central Association for Prevention of Labor Disabilities, and the Japan Health and Sports Federation will voluntarily disband and give up their lucrative permit businesses is simply unimaginable. What, then, can be done about the tens of thousands of other agencies and special government corporations – all working in secrecy and against whose fiat there is no recourse?

The public may be able to combat the bureaucracy over certain high-profile projects such as the Pont des Arts, or well-publicized scandals such as dioxin contamination. But power lies in the details, in the thousands of tiny Pont des Arts-type monuments rising quietly in every city and hamlet, in the myriad unreported dump sites not covered by the media, and deep in the impenetrable thicket of regulations in the form of unwritten «guidance» hemming in the life of the nation.