The education ministry probe into its officials' involvement in securing jobs for retiring bureaucrats has uncovered even more cases in which the legal ban on such practices was violated and circumvented to land lucrative positions for fresh retirees in universities and organizations that they used to oversee. Education minister Hirokazu Matsuno has confirmed that the ministry's officials systematically broke the tightened rules on amakudari (descent from heaven), as the practice is known. The Abe administration needs to follow through on its pledge to fully investigate whether similar wrongdoing has taken place in other government organizations.

The administration needs to go further and answer the fundamental question of whether the hiring of retired bureaucrats by businesses and other parties over which their government bodies held supervisory powers, such as issuing permits and distributing subsidies, leads to collusive ties that distort the administrative process to the detriment of public interests. The amakudari rules were tightened following revelations of collusion between the bureaucracy and private-sector organizations that re-hired their former officials. The Abe administration must review whether the current rules are effective enough to eliminate the risk of such collusion.

The 2007 amendment to the law on national government bureaucrats prohibits officials from being involved in job placement for retiring bureaucrats and bans bureaucrats while they're on the government payroll from looking for a job in businesses and other organizations that their ministries and agencies supervise. According to the probe, the education ministry blatantly circumvented this rule by having a retired official act as a go-between. This person is believed to have been involved in landing positions for 23 of the 37 retiring bureaucrats whose cases have been ordered investigated by the Cabinet Office.