Valdivia: Gakubatsu - The Fukushima 50

"I KNOW what time is," said Augustine of Hippo, "but if you ask me I cannot tell you." Good governance similarly evades definition. It is too volatile a topic to even be discussed. It is intellectually complex. It can only be described at the most.

Japan is an example of a country that employs good governance; hence, most of its citizens believe that they are Japan in Asia, a developed country like the United States that happens to be located in Asia, and rightly so. Their heroic response to the magnitude 9 Sendai earthquake and the resulting tsunami-not to mention the near meltdown of the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant Station-is the result of good governance. Their efficiency is most effective, their resiliency nonpareil. Their governance has a nonbureaucratic element of bureaucracy - a blending of the abstract and the concrete. The networks connecting the state and the private sector are an example of particulars given equal account with the universal. And their leadership is well balanced by their institutions. If the image of Japan now is akin to an Ogata Korin painting, a picture of monstrous waves that's tamed, the rest of the world need not wonder why.

Post your online prayers for Japan earthquake victims

Networks like the Gakubatsu or ties among classmates at the elite universities from which officials of a corporation are recruited may have accounted for the heroism most of the Japanese exhibited in their latest debacle. The tale of the "The Fukushima 50," a group of engineers and technicians who volunteered to stay and brave the radiation to mitigate the nuclear plant from turning into an inferno that will bring more disaster, is heroism seen only in movies. The cohesiveness of these informal networks gives them identity as a group or as a nation. Gakubatsu is said to be a prime requirement for entry into a network, a valued attribute among loyal members of Gakubatsus. This administrative web is woven more thoroughly into Japanese society than perhaps any other in the world, as international relations experts claim. The state's effectiveness therefore emerges not from its own inherent capacity but from the complexity and stability of its interaction with market players like the Gakubatsus. Good.

Contrast the phenomenon that is Japan to the predation that is Zaire during the reign of President Joseph Mobutu Sese Seko. His reign is a classic case of a predatory state in which the preoccupation of the political class turned the citizenry into its prey. Then everything was for sale, court orders were bought, and prisoners lived forgotten in prison. At the height of Mobutu's power there was the presidential clique called "The 50 Odd Kinsmen" who occupied the most lucrative positions such as the judiciary, secret police, and interior ministry. This "kleptopatrimonial" rule of the "The 50 Odd Kinsmen" is an amalgam of personalism and a marketized administrative system incapable of formulating and delivering coherent goals to its people. Bad.

One wonders whether there exists a similar clique that governs the Philippines, whether there are presidential kins, like Mobutu's "50 Odd Kinsmen" or presidential brotherhood like the Gakubatsu. Searching for institutional cliques on which to build rapid responses to the needs of the citizenry is not anathema to good governance-that is, if one hits a jackpot like Japan's Ministry of International Trade and Industry (MITI), the goose they say that laid the golden years for Japan. MITI is adjudged the place where the greatest concentration of brainpower is, and where official agencies and their ministers have been and still are the most prestigious in the country. The fact that MITI and other networks in Japan functioned with relative autonomy and succeeded-as contrasted to Zaire's "kleptopatristic" governance that failed-provides one with a picture of how to govern and how not to govern.

What now PNoy, how are we to be governed? So long as we maintain a coherent, competent, and comprehensive bureaucratic organization with or without Gakubatsu, good governance is but 50 yards away.