During Asia’s economic crisis, US policy toward Japan is based on disdain for its overweening bureaucrats. But Japan is hardly unique. Bureaucracies dominate most countries; it is the US that is the exception. Such elites can hold power for decades, despite repeated blunders, because even developed countries fear social disintegration without their leadership. In Japan, where society’s stability takes precedence over the economy, the bureaucrats’ caution, bred by past traumas, is not as foolish as many Westerners think. Defending the bureaucrats is wiser than trashing them.
