[Photo] Sento Imperial Palace In Kyoto

The approval rate of the Kan Cabinet has fallen below 20% which is said to be a dangerous level for maintaining a Cabinet, and the DPJ administration has suffered during this Diet session.

Before the change of regime in 2009, the DPJ promised two major proposals in their manifest. First was a non bureaucratic led government and the other was to create 16.8 trillion yen in revenue for policies such as child compensation by excluding wastefulness and the transformation of the national budget.

This time let's look at the former issue.
The DPJ insisted that the LDP regime was dependent on bureaucrats and the bureaucratic led governments that has continued for many years since 1955.

As a result, a strange custom had been put into practice that let many executive bureaucrats parachute to high positions in both private and public sectors before reaching their retirement age. This is called "the Amakudari system".

In order to maintain this system, the bureaucrat organizations had to create new institutions which could accept their executives. Moreover, the bureaucratic led government subsidized such institutions and to date, the amount of the subsidy is about 12 trillion yen per year.

Since the DPJ was the opposition party, they promised to stop "the Amakudari system" and abolish institutions which accepted bureaucrat executives and to reduce bureaucratic costs by 20%.
These policies are summarized as the non bureaucratic led government. However, so far, the DPJ government has not realized this promise.