When Ichiro Asahina, a 32-year-old bureaucrat at the Agency for Natural Resources and Energy, was studying at Harvard University between 2001 and 2003, he had time to think about what Kasumigaseki, Tokyo's governmental hub, meant to him and to Japan.
Hoping to help build a better country, he joined the ranks of the elite who serve in the government in 1997, but after several years on the job, he began to feel something was wrong.
In postwar Japan, the best and the brightest had always aimed for careers in Kasumigaseki, but these days that is no longer true as the nation's bureaucrats often become the target of criticism for not being able to resolve the country's problems and scandals involving civil servants make newspaper headlines.