Nobuteru Ishihara, state minister in charge of administrative reform, warned central government bureaucracies on Sunday that resistance to privatization of government-affiliated organizations is futile.
"If (the ministries and agencies) again reply that there is no public corporation to be privatized or scrapped, we will simply counter them with our version for privatization and scrapping," Ishihara told a TV program.
Ishihara, the son of Tokyo Gov. Shintaro Ishihara, was referring to the request he made for proposals for privatizing public corporations to the government's various ministries and agencies.
He said that Sept. 3 will be the deadline for submitting the proposals to him, and that he has also asked the bodies to give clear reasons if they cannot come up any proposals.
"Since the prime minister has said that in principle (public corporations) should be either scrapped or privatized, I assigned (the bureaucrats) the task of making proposals themselves," he said.
Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi has pledged to carry out drastic structural reform within the central government. , which has long been perceived as a hot bed of corruption and waste fueled by pork-barrel politics. The ministries and agencies responded to Ishihara by Aug. 10, effectively saying that there is no single public corporation that should be abolished or handed over to the private sector.