Before the Japanese cabinet approves a government bill, the bill is first approved inside the governing Liberal Democratic Party. This is the jizen shinsa-sei, the prior review system.
The usual view dates it to a letter of 1962 from Akagi Munenori, chairman of the party’s General Council, to Chief Cabinet Secretary Ōhira Masayoshi. One study argues that it began in 1955, when the party was founded and approval by its Policy Research Council became a condition for a cabinet decision on a bill.
Until 2009, the top civil servants of the ministries, the administrative vice-ministers, met on the day before each cabinet meeting, normally twice a week. They met to settle the items for the cabinet, such as bills, cabinet orders and appointments.
On September 17, 2009, the day after the Democratic Party of Japan government took office, the meeting held its last session, to confirm its own abolition. In 2012, the Abe cabinet renamed an existing liaison meeting of the ministries the Vice-Ministers’ Liaison Meeting.
Decisions of the Japanese cabinet are not made by majority vote. They require unanimity.
When a matter is settled, each minister signs the cabinet document with a kaō, a stylized signature written with a brush, to confirm that all are agreed. This has been the custom since the cabinet system began.
In the Japanese Diet, it is common practice for the handling of business to be decided in negotiations between the parties’ Diet Affairs Committees, the kokkai taisaku iinkai. At important moments, the committee chairs of the parties meet to settle it.
Dangō is bid-rigging. Bidders agree among themselves in advance, raise the price, and take turns winning the work.
In 2002, Japan passed a law to stop the national government, local governments and public corporations, as the ordering parties, from taking part in their bidders’ dangō. It took effect in 2003.
In the folklorist Miyamoto Tsuneichi’s Wasurerareta Nihonjin (The Forgotten Japanese), the chapter “In Tsushima” describes a village meeting, the yoriai. The chapter draws on his experience during a survey of the island in 1950.
“When a village decides something,” he wrote, “everyone talks for as many days as it takes, until everyone is satisfied.” The book collects the series “Toshiyoritachi,” published in the magazine Minwa from 1958 to 1960, and other essays.
Many large Japanese companies have a jōmukai, a meeting of the managing directors. Unlike the board of directors and the shareholders’ meeting, it is not required by law.
Japanese encyclopedias describe it as the place where matters that the board will formally decide are discussed in substance. There, nearly all important management decisions are made.
Dandori (段取り): the order and steps for doing something, and the preparation for it.
Dandori hachibu (段取り八分): preparation is eighty percent. Good preparation is eighty percent of success.
A ringi-sho is a proposal drafted at the lower levels of an organization and passed in turn to the relevant departments and sections. Each manager adds a personal seal, the hanko. Approval builds up level by level, and final approval rests with the head of the organization.
The political scientist Tsuji Kiyoaki studied the system in Japanese government. He criticized it because it spreads responsibility across many seals.