NEWS

Guest Lecture by Ms. Karen Makishima, Minister for Digital

Update: February 22, 2022

On Monday, February 14, a guest lecture inviting ICU alumna Ms. Karen Makishima, the current Minister for Digital Agency, Minister of State for Regulatory Reform, and Minister in Charge of Administrative Reform, was held as part of an online class of Public Administration (taught by Professor by Special Appointment Takashi Nishio, Public Policy Major), a major subject of ICU College of Liberal Arts. Ms. Makishima primarily talked about the challenges faced by digital administration in Japan and her duties as a Cabinet member. Some 115 students attended the lecture.

To begin with, Ms. Makishima talked about her background starting from how she came across public administration while studying at ICU and being interested in various things, how she wrote her graduate and doctoral theses under Prof. Takashi Nishio, and her defeat in an election after acquiring her doctorate and the subsequent successful election. Her research, which sounded ironical during the election, has been extremely helpful in her work as a minister, she said, and called upon the participants to "have plenty of second thoughts and take on challenges."

She then talked about the launch of the Digital Agency and how she wrote the proposal herself and made it happen. After explaining the serious situation of Japan's public administration, with no progress in digitalization as witnessed during the delays in the distribution of the 100,000-yen payment to households amid the COVID-19 pandemic, she talked about how she highlighted, in the proposal, the necessity of a single minister handling the digitalization and administrative reform of public administration and regulatory reform.

She introduced the initiatives of the Digital Agency including deregulation of medical use of antigen kits, digitalization of communication systems of schools and launching of a working group regarding how agile policy making and policy evaluation should be. She also spoke about the public administration concept called the "administrative infallibility myth," and said that reforms are underway to switch from the culture of following precedents, avoiding challenges, and postponing issues to a nimble decision-making system that suits the requirements of the times. She cited an example of aiming to deliver an application when the need exists, following up with bug-fixing, rather than taking time to create a flawless application.

Ms. Makishima spoke in detail about the new organization called the Digital Agency. Of the 600 people working at the agency, 200 joined from the private sector, and many are working concurrent jobs or hold concurrent positions at other ministries, and Ms. Makishima talked about how she's consciously putting emphasis on the definition of terms. She further explained that she has made it into a flat, open, and highly transparent organization and has conveyed to the staff to be agile, as the minister will take responsibilities. Some 60% work remotely, and even when they come to work, the office uses free address seating while making clear where the people in charge are.

In the Q&A session with the students, in addition to touching on the day-to-day activities of the minister and the issues in digitalization, Ms. Makishima introduced measures being taken to incorporate academic wisdom and inputs from the ground in public policy and to integrate and standardize the key administrative system 20 of the 1,741 local governments. She also said that she would push forward with policy making with no loopholes by discussing the issues of rights in the metaverse space in collaboration with other ministries. She also stressed the importance of statistics upon studying public administration.

After the lecture, we received the following feedback from students who attended the lecture:
"It was great to have an opportunity to directly learn the current situation of administration as it is, without any media bias."
"I was very much surprised to learn that a written opinion took a tangible form and led to her currently serving as the head of the agency."
"Earlier, I only had the impression that Digital Agency was serving as a facilitator of digital-related policies, but the lecture made me realize that the Digital Agency functions as the control tower for comprehensively implementing digital policies."
"As the world becomes more complex and you are expected to be making decisions smoothly, the explanation that the idea of making decisions based on precedents is still dominant seems like a typical bureaucratic decision-making method and it was very interesting."
"(Ms. Makishima) spoke fluently and in detail and appeared to be very knowledgeable of the entire work of the Digital Agency as well as her own job as a minister. It changed my view of ministers a little."