An assessment of Makiko Tanaka as a reformer

Naotaka Fujita, The Asahi Shimbun, Tokyo

As foreign minister, Makiko Tanaka championed "political leadership" to wrest control of the Foreign Ministry from the bureaucracy. But there are no signs she exercised that kind of leadership to reform the scandal-plagued ministry.

She rarely joined the senior vice minister and the parliamentary secretary-the other politicians at the ministry- when they met bureaucrats for consultations on implementing "guidelines for reform," which were drafted in June last year. Most of the time, she was too busy and stayed away.

Three months before Tanaka's arrival, the Foreign Ministry began moving toward fixing its organizational problems and questionable customary practices in the wake of a scandal that had come to light in January 2001, a case of fraud involving the ministry's secret funds designed to help diplomatic negotiations.

As a response to that scandal, the reform measures that were crafted on Tanaka's watch fell way short of expectations.

Her record hardly justifies the findings of an Asahi Shimbun public opinion poll in which 78 percent said Tanaka, who had just been dismissed, did a good job in reforming the ministry.

Certainly, Tanaka did the right thing when she dismissed the four top bureaucrats who held the post of administrative vice minister while the pocketing of money from the secret funds continued.

But other steps she took were of a "hit or miss" nature, as exemplified by a freeze she ordered for a regular reshuffling of personnel and the dismissal of the chief of the personnel affairs division. Her partiality for actions of this sort did not sow the seeds for institutional reform.

For all her failings, Tanaka continued to publicize the need for reform at the Foreign Ministry, constantly fighting with senior bureaucrats and risking the possibility of dismissal- taking the issue directly to a public appalled by the seemingly unending scandals. The 78 percent approval rating for Tanaka was probably a measure of how the public was impressed by her aggressive approach to reform.

Her populist approach made her a darling of the public. But it also antagonized the bureaucracy and Diet lawmakers of her own party. Her fall as foreign minister in a dispute that originated in a Foreign Ministry decision to bar two nongovernmental organizations from an international conference on Afghanistan's reconstruction came as her battle against the people she had antagonized reached its climax.

Tanaka should be credited with using easy language to explain problems to the public.

The Foreign Ministry has failed to do the same, a stance that does not help to publicize a reform package that has been put together under her successor, Yoriko Kawaguchi.

Describing it as a "gem," a senior ministry official says,

Ministry officials are fond of using jargon and their use of the word saratoi may help explain their penchant for secrecy. This is a technique for withholding information as much as possible. It refers to a situation where the amount of information to be disclosed, say, on the substance of discussion at a summit meeting, in response to a second question is predetermined, on the premise that officials do not answer the first question. Naturally, the formula entails more stage-by- stage caps on providing information.

Digging out information on the niceties of diplomatic negotiations is a job for reporters. The trouble is that ministry officials stuck to the "saratoi" slow drip formula in disclosing information on a series of misappropriation cases that came to light successively last year-refusing to tell everything as they gave news conferences.

Characteristically, the Foreign Ministry was reluctant to impart information on the findings of an in-house inquiry three months ago into off-the-book funds held at the division level that totaled more than 200 million yen.

The division-by-division breakdown was suddenly made public on Feb. 5. The ministry evidently tried to demonstrate a positive stance toward reform by undertaking the investigation, but there are still question marks about its eagerness.