Opinion Bureaucrats By Tony Laszlo	フレームで見る  英文をプリントする  脚注をプリントする
国民の目に映った国家公務員像 日本人がお役人の仕事ぶりを不快に思う裏には、自分も安定した職場で働きたいという気持ち、 すなわち「嫉妬心」が大きく働いているのでは？

I ask the readers' kind forgiveness in advance, for relating a joke that is not only cynical but also somewhat morbid. It goes like this.

Two lions escape together from the city zoo. They decide to split up in order to avoid capture, and set off on separate paths. One withdraws into a wood but is collared by the authorities almost immediately, after assaulting and attempting to devour an unfortunate passerby. The other escapee manages to evade the zookeepers for a whole year. When he too is finally apprehended and returned to his cage, he looks not the least bit haggard, but rather plump and chipper.

Astonished to see his friend in such fine shape, the first lion asks him what he had done to conceal himself so well. "I holed up in one of the central government offices," came the reply, "Huge place. Every few days I came out of hiding and snapped up a bureaucrat - no one caught on." "Imagine that! But what gave you away, in the end?" "They finally noticed me," the lion says glumly, "when I happened to eat the guy who served the afternoon tea and crumpets."

Starting an essay off with a bit of humor like this is risky business; there is no way of knowing whether the reader actually found it funny or not. However, I am confident that this joke has a certain universal appeal. Anyone who has had any kind of contact with government offices can probably appreciate the caricature. While the joke is far from reality, there is probably a kernel of truth in it somewhere.

A recent report by Japan's National Personnel Authority (NPA) suggests that, in fact, this joke should tickle the funny bones of people living in Japan, in particular - unless they are too upset with bureaucrats to even laugh, that is. A full eighty percent of the people who participated in a nationwide survey conducted by the NPA said they were angry or dissatisfied with this country's national public servants.

The grievances were varied, but responders commonly found the national public servants. snobbish, chronically prone to quoting precedent as a way of saying no, completely unwilling to diverge from protocol as laid out in their manuals, and ever eager to give people the run-around. On top of that, they were simply too slow in responding to requests. If we let our minds wander, we can almost imagine that a man-eating feline could surviｖe unnoticed in such an environment - especially if there were no precedents for dealing with the issue of missing co-workers, and nothing in the manuals about wild beasts on the loose!?

True, when a large portion of a population sample has problems with a system, there is probably plenty of room for reform. But there is more to the matter than meets the eye here. Almost forty percent of those polled by the NPA said that they, themselves, wished they could be a national public servant. Another thirty percent said they would want someone in their family to become one. Job security was cited as one of the chief reasons for the attraction. Along with genuine displeasure, there is another emotion at work here, driving people to curse and condemn bureaucrats on the one hand while wishing to join their number on the other. Envy?

Shukan ST: Feb. 6, 2004

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