For the past several months since the devastating March 11 earthquake and tsunami in northeastern Japan, an increasing number of bureaucrats have grown "negligent in their duties" because of what they view as the incompetence of Prime Minister Naoto Kan.

This could conceivably trigger a full-scale collapse of the bureaucracy system, which, for good or bad, has long served as the "backbone" of the administrative branch of Japanese government.

Poor cooperation between the central and local governments has been responsible in large measure for the slow pace of restoring and rebuilding disaster-hit regions, and this is mainly due to negligence on the part of central government bureaucrats.