Why does the state hire so many, though? I bet most countries would easily get more qualified applicants but rather choose to downsize the police force when crime rates decrease. Which makes total sense.
I think most jobs in Japan exist merely to keep the population busy, in the interests of "stability". Unemployed or otherwise "chaotic" life situations are undesirable. The Japanese corporate world isn't really healthy enough to absorb any excess labor, so the public sector takes up the slack.
Just walk into any Japanese business or local government office and the giant stacks of documents and rows of office ladies will make any knowledge-worker have an aneurism at the obvious inefficiencies. But very little (outside of the car industry, maybe) is about being efficient. It's about being "stable". Not that I agree with this at all, it's just my cynical take based on the interactions I've had.
I don't quite understand this attitude. Sure there are inefficiencies but the end result is still often better and faster service than in similar offices in other places of the world.
Germany for instance, if city hall in Berlin had to deal with the same number of cases per day that city halls in Tokyo have to deal with they would conpletely shut down.
My takeaway from your post is "German bureaucracy is even less efficient than Japanese bureaucracy".
Let me clarify: yes, the turn-around time and quality of service is good in Japan. But the input costs are very high manpower AND absolutely astronomical paper consumption. My assertion is that at the very least the consumables costs could be reduced, in the long run, by switching to things like fillable PDF forms, with little or no degradation in quality of service. Japan is a perfect place for PDF forms because there is already a form for almost everything, and there really don't seem to be "edge cases" too often. I should be able to fill in my information at a kiosk and the document gets digitally signed by the reviewing employee (because the government workers should have CACs with digital certificates), and it goes into a file server.....instead of onto a bookshelf. Then you also don't need to allocate manpower to manually transport boxes of documents once a season to the "head office" either.
No, I think Germany'a bureaucracy is quite efficient along the dimensions you describe, like PDF forms, but it still is generally a longer wait, and a lot of unhelpful unresourceful, unmotivated, personell. But on paper they appear more efficient.
My point was that just because Japanese processes look inefficient they aren't necessarily so.
You can get a lot of stuff printed out and processed by the Tokyo city halls in a matter of minutes (they look up your details in a DB). They also have a lot of paper piles, but that hasn't affected my experience.
There's still a lot to improve in Germany too. From a Northern European perspective the German bureaucracy is archaic and inefficient, though points for thoroughness. The main complaints would be
1. Lack of Internet services. This may be hindered by lack of national strong authentication? I'm not German national so not sure what the pain point there is.
2. Paper based. The paper is the document, instead of being a representation of a fact. I'm not used to storing paper. I assume this is also at least a partial reason to the astronomical side costs of apartment purchases.
3. Lack of communication between authorities. Granted, this may be by design as a privacy guarantee. Regardless, taking a paper from one place to another is inefficient. I'm used to, say, banks reporting my capital income to the tax office without me having to work as a useless mediator.
But Germany is the epitome of efficiency, no? That's what I meant. Japan always gets a bad rep but Germany should too. At least in Japan the staff is typically nice (excluding the immigration office as the only exception I know of).
Germany somehow is indeed seen as efficient. There's some truth there, in comparison to Southern Europe at least -- everything works and corruption isn't an issue -- but it's by no means a gold standard. I've started to call it "German thoroughness" instead.
