In February 1967, Kōdansha published Nakane Chie’s Tate shakai no ningen kankei (Human Relations in a Vertical Society). It grew out of an article in the May 1964 issue of the magazine Chūō Kōron. The book became a long-seller. One account puts its sales in Japan at 1.17 million copies, another at more than 1.16 million in 124 printings.
Nakane herself said that it is a misunderstanding to read tate, vertical, as top-down command or as a structure of power.
On September 25, 2020, Kōno Tarō, minister for administrative reform, announced that the Cabinet Office’s regulatory reform hotline would be renamed Tatewari 110-ban, the vertical-division emergency line. 110 is the police emergency number in Japan. He said that about 5,000 messages had already come in and were being read.
By 6 p.m. on November 19, 2020, the count was 7,191. At a press conference the next day, asked how many had led to action, he answered: Ima wa nai desu ne. None for now.
On January 6, 2001, Japan’s central government was reorganized. One office and 22 ministries and agencies became one office and 12. According to a government white paper, one of the four pillars of the reform was to remove the harm of tatewari gyōsei, vertically divided administration.
During the Pacific War, the Imperial Japanese Army built its own transport submarine, the maru-yu, and ran it separately from the navy. The navy, for its part, built a tank. Once, a navy ship signaled to the army’s boat: Nanji wa nanimono naru ya. Sensui kanō naru ya. Who are you? Can you dive?
The two services also competed over budgets, personnel and the balance of power in the cabinet. One account argues that the army’s need was urgent rather than a matter of pride, because transport by sea was the army’s job.
In the first months of the COVID-19 pandemic, clinics reported new cases to public health centers by fax. On May 15, 2020, the government began trial operation of HER-SYS, a system for reporting them electronically. By September 10, 2020, all 155 local governments with public health centers were using it.
The government’s 2021 white paper on information and communications also noted that each ministry had built its own vertically divided office network.
Mizuho was formed in 2000 from three banks: the Industrial Bank of Japan, Fuji Bank and Dai-Ichi Kangyo Bank. Its appointments were mocked as tasuki-gake jinji, sash-crossing personnel, for being shared out among the former banks.
In November 2021, after repeated system failures, the news site J-CAST called kyūkō ishiki, legacy-bank consciousness, the more serious problem. It quoted a source close to the Financial Services Agency who said the bank had become takotsubo-teki, like octopus pots.
On September 1, 2021, Japan’s Digital Agency began work. Prime Minister Suga Yoshihide had named gyōsei no tatewari, the vertical division of administration, as the cause of the problem. He announced: “We will create the Digital Agency as a system that brings together related policies divided among several ministries and pushes them forward strongly.”
An article in Gendai Business noted that the greeting at the launch did not use the words tatewari daha, breaking the vertical division.