From the opening of the Diet in 1890, its proceedings were recorded by stenographers writing by hand. In this century, both houses stopped hiring and training new stenographers. In May 2011, Kyoto University announced that the House of Representatives had introduced a new system for producing its minutes, based on speech recognition developed by its researchers.
Stenographers correct and edit the output of the speech recognition in a special editor to produce the draft of the record.
By a cabinet decision of March 28, 2014, the Cabinet Secretariat began to keep records of the proceedings of cabinet meetings and to post them on the prime minister’s website about three weeks later. On April 22, 2014, the minutes of the meeting of April 1 appeared. A government document had noted that creating and publishing such records had been considered inappropriate.
On November 13, 2020, Kōno Tarō, minister for administrative reform, said at a press conference that 14,992 kinds of administrative procedures, including attached documents, required a seal. Of these, 14,909, more than 99 percent, would no longer require one. Only 83 would keep it. Every mitomein, the everyday seal that does not prove identity, would be abolished.
On March 12, 2018, the Ministry of Finance reported to directors of the Budget Committee of the House of Councillors that 14 documents had been altered in dozens of places. The documents concerned a transaction of state land with the school operator Moritomo Gakuen. According to Akahata, the newspaper of the Communist Party, the ministry’s Financial Bureau had altered the lease and sale resolutions and a kessai bunsho, an approval document.
Akahata reported that the deleted passages included the names of Prime Minister Abe Shinzō, his wife Akie and several other politicians.
Mochimawari kakugi: a cabinet meeting by circulation. The National Diet Library explains that when a matter must be handled urgently without calling the ministers together, a cabinet official simply collects their signatures. A guide to Japanese politics describes it this way: officials carry the decision papers around to each minister, and the decision is made when all have signed.
On May 25, 2017, Maekawa Kihei held a press conference. He had been administrative vice-minister of education, the highest civil servant of the ministry. He spoke about internal documents on the plan of the Kake Gakuen school group to open a veterinary faculty.
The documents, he said, had been shared among senior officials and had certainly existed. Atta mono wa nakatta koto ni dekinai. What existed cannot be made not to exist.
The ojigi hanko, the bowing seal, is a personal seal stamped at a slant on a document, so that it leans toward the seal of the superior beside it. A business guide by Money Forward calls it one of the business manners that some companies treat as a rule.
Its origin is uncertain. A writer in the magazine President says that, by one account, a department of a major city bank made it a rule, and the rule spread as a rumor. He adds that even this is not certain.
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 Japanese business, an oboegaki, a memorandum, records what both sides have agreed. When the terms of a contract change after signing, the parties may record the change in an oboegaki. Exchanging one serves as evidence that both sides agreed to the added or changed terms.
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.