Ninety Trillion

Ninety trillion yen? That's ridiculous. Why is our national budget always so big? Did DPJ say it would make the budget from scratch?
I think I know how hard it is to reduce the budget from my own experience when I managed the research budget of my laboratory in Toshiba. It is next to impossible to cut unless you are a specialist of the field and know the detail of the work in the field. Detail is always important when you would like to accomplish your work well. Most of the top management who administers the budget fatally misses the sense of the detail; what's important, what's not.
The gap between front line workers and managers is always huge. The gap arises from the amount of knowledge of the detail. Front line workers sometimes get lost and almost drowned in the detail and go a wrong way, while top management do not have enough knowledge of the detail and make a wrong decision because they tend not to have the experience of front line work. It means that they have little idea about what is critical to a work to be accomplished and what is not.
So the common maneuver of the top management is to cut budgets across-the-board. All the divisions cut the same rate, say, 10 % of their budget. This way, the cut feels fair to every division he administers. It is the way of less complaints from individual divisions but has the possibility of cutting a critical budget under the name of fairness.
A capable manager, however, would not be afraid of the complaints of the division of which budget is cut more than other divisions. He only follows the simple rule: he cuts the budget which he thinks is important and even increases the budget which he thinks is necessary. But the problem is how he does it without the knowledge about the detail. He leaves the work to the people who he trusts and who have the detailed knowledge of the work.
In the DPJ's case those people they should trust are after all bureaucrats. They know the detail. They are the specialists. I think their prides so far have been hurt since DPJ started ruling the government. Without their help, no item of the DPJ manifest will be fulfilled.
Our new government is now searching their way in a trial and error manner. We must be lenient about their mistakes. I hope they will learn to change their attitude toward bureaucrats at least in the direction of respecting them.