Mandarins pull the strings and tie politicians in knots: Powerful civil servants in Japan are saying 'No, minister' to attempts to deregulate the economy, Terry McCarthy writes from Tokyo

A RECENT episode in a Japanese rice field embarrassed both the country's civil servants and its politicians, because it demonstrated the power the first group has over the second. The new government has vowed to cut back on bureaucratic red tape, only to meet resistance every step of the way.

The Prime Minister, Morihiro Hosokawa, was visiting rice farmers in northern Japan whose harvests have been badly hit by typhoons and torrential rain this year. Television and newspaper reporters relayed his sympathetic remarks to the nation.

Then it was discovered that the whole outing had been scripted: a reporter found prompt notes written by a bureaucrat from the Ministry of Agriculture, with such comments as: 'The damage has been really bad, hasn't it?', 'Don't let your spirits get down', and 'I've heard that this has been the coolest summer ever'.

Mr Hosokawa, with his university education and his experience as a journalist and prefectural governor, might reasonably be expected to think of his own words of sympathy for stricken farmers. But such are the pretentions of the nation's bureaucrats that even such a simple affair had to be scripted by them.

The job of a bureaucrat is traditionally more prestigious in Japan than in the West. Deriving from the Chinese system of government by mandarins, or scholar-administrators, which was imported to Japan 13 centuries ago, the Japanese bureaucracy confers high social status on its members.

Ministries recruit top graduates from the most respected universities and although pay is not as good as in the private sector, they are steered into positions of extraordinary influence, unimaginable even by the likes of Sir Humphrey in Yes, Minister. For example, Japanese bureaucrats do not simply write ministers' speeches - often they appear in person in parliament to answer questions considered 'too complex' for their political masters to deal with. And when they reach retiring age, top bureaucrats 'descend from heaven' (amakudari) into comfortable directorships in companies they had formerly been responsible for regulating.

Paternalistic at their best, at their worst they can be simply contemptuous of ordinary citizens. After the Independent published an article this summer in which a woman in a hairdresser's salon gave her view of the country's political changes, a diplomat in the Japanese Embassy in London complained that the paper should quote 'a mere housewife' in discussing complex political developments. The diplomat did not appear to think that the woman, of voting age, might have a legitimate point of view within the democratic system.

Of course the Japanese have much to thank their civil servants for. Bureaucrats, particularly those from the Ministry of International Trade and Industry and the Ministry of Finance, can take much of the credit for co-ordinating Japan's post-war economic miracle. But with a mature economy, the power of bureaucrats is seen, and increasingly resented, in their discretionary control over the maze of regulations that govern almost every aspect of life in Japan, from the permissible size of plastic bottles for mineral water, to the exact positioning of bus stops in provincial towns, to the size of the budget in the world's second-largest economy. Newspaper cartoonists have begun to depict the country's proud mandarins as bespectacled cockroaches, fussing endlessly over their little administrative quandaries.

Last week a report on governmental reform, which was 12 years in the making, was completed, but even the chairman in charge of drawing up the report admitted that bureaucrats had rendered it 'toothless'. The Provisional Council for the Promotion of Administrative Reform had been charged with seeking ways to deregulate Japan's bureaucratic system, but members of the council said their work was blocked at every step - by bureaucrats.

Japan's Fair Trade Commission has estimated that nearly half of the economy is heavily regulated - subject to licensing, approval or authorisation regulations, and price-quantity controls. Officially there are 10,924 such regulations, although if unwritten 'administrative guidance' is included, the number is much higher. Mr Hosokawa has said he wants to do away with many of these regulations to lower prices and give more choice to consumers. But at every turn in the deregulation maze the mandarins always seem to be one step ahead.

Some draw parallels between Mr Hosokawa's predicament and the fate of the Maekawa Report, drawn up in 1986 by Haruo Maekawa, a former governor of the Bank of Japan. Under pressure to suggest ways of reducing the country's trade surplus, the report recommended cutting prices, improving the quality of life, and promoting imports. But few of its recommendations were acted on by bureaucrats, who did not want to dilute their own power.

Mr Hosokawa today finds himself repeating reformist themes that have almost become cliches. Sir Humphrey would be delighted. 'Radical economic reform giving more power to consumers? Yes, Prime Minister.'