Public Management Reforms in Japan: With and After NPM

In this chapter, I will verify public management reforms in Japan. From the second half of the 1990s until the beginning of the 2000s, at timing that was approximately ten years later than that of Anglo-Saxon countries, many reforms that were influenced by New Public Management (NPM) were conducted in Japan as well. I will describe the characteristics of Japan’s public administration by following the process by which central and local governments accepted the ideas that support NPM and the methods that have been developed by those ideas. In parallel with NPM, reforms based on different paradigms from NPM, such as the Neo-Weberian State (NWS) and New Public Governance (NPG), were also conducted. I would like to indicate the prospects for public management reforms in the post-NPM era by clarifying the fact that Japan’s public administration is forming a hybrid governance system in which different reform paradigms co-exist in multiple tiers.