Introduction

The primary purpose of this final chapter is to enumerate and unravel the challenges of public policy analysis as an intellectual and practical activity in Japan. This is achieved by drawing on the numerous examples explored in previous chapters, and bringing together the analysis made to outline future directions for public policy analysis in Japan.

As was discussed in previous chapters, especially in Part Two, Japanese governments, both at the central and local levels, have never been indifferent to enhancing their employees’ skills in relation to policy analysis. Every year, they have dispatched a number of promising young bureaucrats to top-level universities mainly in the US and European Union (EU), allowing them to participate in one- or two-year advanced policy-related programmes. They have established as many as 12 ministryaffiliated research institutions, while governmental organisations set up to support legislatures’ policymaking activities are comparable with similar institutions in other advanced democracies. A few internal policy advisory councils have opened the door to outside policy analysts, though a great majority of them remain a tightly knit, closed community. Much effort has been made in developing more and more public policy programmes to foster and upgrade students’ practical analytical skills. The urgent need to activate a policy market, where competing policy alternatives are advocated by major policy actors, such as political parties, business associations, labour unions, non-profit organisations (NPOs) and non-governmental organisations (NGOs), social movements, the media, and policy analysts working for universities or think tanks, is now widely acknowledged.

The existence of such positive trends should neither be ignored nor underestimated. Still, judging the more or less ‘pessimistic’ tone evident in almost all of the previous chapters regarding the state of policy analysis in Japan, there is much room for further improvement. To begin with, policy analysis has not yet been established as a fully fledged profession in Japan, and its application has consequently been quite limited. Moreover, it has rarely been successful in fulfilling its original mission of monitoring and correcting the ‘democratic myopia’ by means of introducing systemic thinking into the policymaking process. Its limited application and poor performance might be mainly due to the insufficient understanding, on the part of the governmental, market and civic sectors, of the potential contributions that policy analysis can make for improved policymaking and policy implementation.