Ebook: Japan’s Interventionist State The role of the MAFF

Japan's Interventionist State

Japan’s Interventionist State is a major study of one of Japan’s key bureaucratic institutions - the Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries (MAFF). It highlights the MAFF’s significance as an independent player in Japan’s agricultural support and protection regime and explains why the MAFF seeks to preserve its role as the principal agent of government intervention in the farm sector. Supporting this central explanatory argument is a new theory of state intervention based on bureaucratic self-interest.

The book argues that an important and undertheorised cause of MAFF resistance to market-oriented reform is its vested interest in supplying intervention and in sustaining an entrenched architecture of intervention in agriculture.

Aurelia George Mulgan is Associate Professor of Politics at the University of New South Wales, Australian Defence Force Academy. She has published widely on Japanese politics, political economy and international relations and is the author of The Politics of Agriculture in Japan (Routledge, 2000), and Japan's Failed devolution: Koizumi and the Politics of Economic Reform (Asia Pacific Press, 2002).