The Importance of Academic Background for Politicians: A Comparative Analysis of Global Leaders

2023-09-16 00:00:00

What kind of academic background is required for politicians? Commentator Kazuo Yawata says, “Many leaders of developed countries have brilliant academic backgrounds, but the Japanese prime minister in recent years has not. If the human resources we possess are not leaders, we will fall behind the world’s leading edge in every field.”

Photo = Jiji Press Photo

Prime Minister Fumio Kishida (front row, center) and other members of the Cabinet pose for a commemorative photo following the first cabinet meeting, on the followingnoon of September 13, 2023, at the Prime Minister’s Office.

The last “University of Tokyo graduate and former bureaucrat” is Kiichi Miyazawa.

Of all the professions, being a national leader, such as a president or prime minister, is a job that requires the highest level of intelligence, expertise, and professional experience. In fact, there are many graduates from Harvard University in the United States, Oxford University in the United Kingdom, and the French National Institute of Public Administration (ENA) in France.

In Japan as well, prewar prime ministers were generally bureaucrats or professional soldiers who graduated from imperial universities, and even following the war until the end of the Showa era, many were bureaucrats, lawyers, journalists, etc.

However, in the Heisei era, the number of local politicians increased, and eventually the country became dominated by hereditary politicians. The last prime minister who graduated from the Faculty of Law at the University of Tokyo and was a former bureaucrat was Kiichi Miyazawa, who took office in 1991 (retired in 1993).

Since then, his final academic background following Morihiro Hosokawa, who graduated from Sophia University, has been Seijo University (Takashi Hada), Meiji University (Tomiichi Murayama), Keio University (Ryutaro Hashimoto), Waseda University (Keizo Obuchi), and Waseda University (Yoshiro Mori). ), Keio University (Junichiro Koizumi), Seikei University (Shinzo Abe), Waseda University (Yasuo Fukuda), Gakushuin University (Taro Aso), Faculty of Engineering, University of Tokyo (Yukio Hatoyama), Tokyo Institute of Technology (Naoto Kan), Waseda University (Noda) Yoshihiko), Hosei University (Yoshihide Suga), and Waseda University (Fumio Kishida).

*The university name will be unified to the current name.

It is hard to say that he has top-class intelligence.

Although academic background does not directly reflect the intellectual level of each individual, when looked at overall, most leaders from other countries have the highest level of academic background, intellect, general education, and specialized knowledge in their own countries. It’s very different from what I have. Isn’t the above list of the Prime Minister’s educational background lower than, for example, the distribution of graduates of top-tier companies for general-track positions?

Among the above, Yukio Hatoyama, who graduated from the Faculty of Engineering at the University of Tokyo, probably stands out from the rest in terms of intellect, but he is skillful and talented in studying for entrance exams, and does not appear to have a deep general education. Morihiro Hosokawa is a particularly well-educated man who is a nobleman and is connected to the Konoe family tradition. There is no doubt that Shinzo Abe is intelligent, but I have the impression that he only started seriously reading books and studying following he resigned from his post following his first administration failed.

As we will analyze in detail below, successive prime ministers from pre-war to post-war years attended high schools under the old system, imperial universities, military academies and naval academies, military academies and naval academies, and most of them had experience of studying or working abroad. The deterioration is more severe than that of

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