TOKYO -- Japan's elite bureaucratic jobs, filled by workers long crucial to the country's policymaking, are attracting far fewer applicants as the long, overnight hours exacerbated by the coronavirus drive many of the young employees in these posts to quit.
The 14,310 applicants for Japan's fiscal 2021 comprehensive national civil service exam represent a 14% drop from the previous year, the National Personnel Authority said in April. This number for the elite career-track test was the lowest under the current exam system introduced in fiscal 2012.
The career-track bureaucrats, who engage in central government policymaking at the ministries and agencies in Tokyo's Kasumigaseki district, hold what once was a very popular job among university students. During the 1990s, it was not unusual for only one in every 30 applicants to pass the national civil service exam used at the time.
Total applicants for the fiscal 2020 exam fell to less than half the peak number seen in fiscal 1996. The success rate in the spring comprehensive civil service exam for college graduates rose to 1 per 10 to 15 applicants.
Chief Cabinet Secretary Katsunobu Kato thinks long hours at the ministries and agencies in Kasumigaseki are a major reason the bureaucratic jobs have become less popular.
"[Long working hours have] also been cited as a reason for an increase in the number of early retirees," he said. "Work style reform is an urgent matter."
Parliamentary duties are the main contributor to these long hours. Bureaucrats prepare written replies for their ministers and superiors to questions that will be asked by lawmakers in the Diet. But these questions often are not brought to the bureaucrats until late in the evening of the prior day, forcing them to work far into the night.
Bureaucrats were handed additional work in 2020 responding to COVID-19. As Japan sought to control the spread of infections, these employees handled critical tasks such as devising budgets, drafting laws and designing new programs.
Tokyo consulting firm Work Life Balance surveyed national government employees about their work in 2020, following the spread of coronavirus infections. From March to May, in the early phase of the COVID-19 pandemic, 40% of the 480 respondents worked more than 100 hours of overtime per month.
This year, members of the Cabinet Secretariat office for promoting COVID-19 countermeasures averaged 122 hours of overtime in January. One official amassed 378 hours of overtime.
At the government offices in Kasumigaseki, the growing number of young employees who quit was a problem even before the pandemic. A survey by the Cabinet Bureau of Personnel Affairs shows that 562 central government clerical employees 29 or younger retired for personal reasons in fiscal 2019, more than twice the number in fiscal 2015.
Taro Kono, the minister for regulatory reform, warns that Japan "will face a crisis." Voluntary retirements among comprehensive civil service employees in their 20s quadrupled in fiscal 2019 compared with six years earlier, Kono revealed on his blog.
If the number of young civil servants leaving their jobs continues to rise, Japan's ability to formulate policy will weaken. But there are no signs of improvement in the workplace environment amid the pandemic. In a Work Life Balance survey last month, 30% of respondents said they had not received overtime pay owed to them, in part because telework had not been included in overtime.