Youngsters are fleeing Japan’s once-mighty civil service

“WE WORK for the nation, not for the cabinet minister,” crows Kazagoshi Shingo, the hero of “The Summer of Bureaucrats”, a Japanese novel. Kazagoshi, an official at the ministry of trade and industry, refuses to rise from his seat to greet his minister, a politician only nominally above him in the hierarchy. Published in 1975, the book captured the power of Japanese mandarins during the post-war boom, when graduates from elite universities clamoured for jobs in marquee ministries. Top bureaucrats had status and power akin to top bankers. They made the machinery of the Japanese state whir.