- Issues in the Determination Process for Disability Pension Reviews
- Pursuing individual responsibility won’t change anything.
- Simply hunting for villains will only lead to the same thing happening again.
- Hannah Arendt, Evil, Thoughtlessness
- Transparency refers not to “disclosure” but to a “structure that can be stopped.”
Issues in the Determination Process for Disability Pension Reviews
This is not an article about misconduct, but about structure.
The other day, I came across a news article. It reported that at the Japan Pension Service, which handles disability pension operations, staff members were secretly discarding doctors’ assessments and asking other doctors to re-evaluate cases.
Regarding the national disability pension paid to persons with disabilities, it was revealed on the 28th through interviews with related parties that within the Japan Pension Service, which handles the practical operations, staff members were secretly destroying the assessment records when they judged there were problems with the findings of doctors who reviewed whether to grant or deny benefits. They then asked another doctor to reassess the case. The Pension Service acknowledged this practice in response to inquiries, stating, “We are currently confirming the facts, including the number of cases.”While staff members lack the authority to overturn a doctor’s decision, this practice appears to have been ongoing for many years. There is a possibility that some individuals may have been deprived of their right to receive pensions due to these re-evaluations. The fact that staff judgment influenced payment decisions threatens to undermine trust in the system.
In this article, I want to put my thoughts on this news into words.
My first impression upon reading this article was, “This isn’t surprising.”
Why did this news fall within my expectations, even evoking a sense of déjà vu? Because countless voices had long been sounding the alarm about the actual practices surrounding the Japan Pension Service’s disability pension assessment operations – criticisms such as “the criteria are applied inconsistently” and
“the decision-making process is opaque and not subject to external review.”
People pointing out that “something’s wrong here” have existed for a very long time.
So, to be honest, my reaction to this news was more of a detached “I knew it,” a sense of “well, of course.”
Having explained my personal first impression, let’s examine the content of this news article in detail. The article’s wording includes phrases like “secretly,” “for many years,” and “rights deprived” – words that carry a certain unease. They suggest a very deep darkness.
However, I don’t consider these expressions excessive. Because if such practices were indeed happening, it means there could be people who were entitled to support but didn’t receive it.
This signifies that the system itself failed to catch those it was supposed to protect. Therefore, these are by no means exaggerated descriptions.
Being disabled myself, and through various connections with people with disabilities, I have seen the world as those with handicaps see it. For people with disabilities, whether they can receive disability pensions is a matter of profound weight, equivalent to “whether they can continue to sustain their own lives.”
Therefore, this news is fundamentally about human lives.
Pursuing individual responsibility won’t change anything.
Therefore, if there are people who were entitled to support but did not receive it, their anger is entirely justified and should never be subject to criticism or suppression.
However, there is something I feel compelled to say. It is this:
Pursuing only individual responsibility will change nothing.
We must not let this end with merely finding a scapegoat.
What we must focus on is the essence of this problem:
What organizational structure allowed such problematic practices to occur?
We need to uncover the flaws in the organizational structure and redesign it to prevent the same mistakes from happening again. Isn’t that what’s truly necessary? We cannot simply conclude that “that employee was at fault.” If we do, the same mistakes will be repeated over and over, just as they have been until now.
- Why were the assessment records able to be destroyed?
- Why did the Japan Pension Service fail to voluntarily maintain transparency despite prior warnings?
- Was the external audit functioning?
I believe it is essential to thoroughly investigate “what was happening” from these perspectives.
Please do not misunderstand me. I am not saying “individuals bear no responsibility.” What I wish to convey is that the core of this problem lies in the organizational structure, and that punishing individuals alone will not prevent recurrence.
Simply hunting for villains will only lead to the same thing happening again.
Here, I recall one past event that made me keenly aware of human imperfection.
It is the so-called “AIDS caused by contaminated blood products incident.”
It was a mistake born from the organizational structure of three parties: the Ministry of Health and Welfare (at the time), pharmaceutical companies, and medical institutions.
It was an incident where many people were infected with HIV and had their lives and futures stolen, caused by non-heat-treated blood products.
Looking back, there were several points where it could have been stopped.
Information suggesting danger, warning signs, and unease felt on the ground were not entirely absent.
Yet it did not stop.
Why?
Because there was a far more sinister structure at play than could be explained by the narrative of “one bad guy did it all.”
Everyone focused only on their own area of responsibility.
They followed “precedent.”
They adhered to procedures.
They said, “Because the experts decided it.”
They said, “It’s not for me to judge.”
And ultimately,
a chain of people who never intended to kill anyone
ended up causing deaths.
The horror I feel about this incident
lies not in human cruelty or malice,
but in how the combination of good intentions, regulations, and organizational convenience
can lead to catastrophic consequences.
Hannah Arendt, Evil, Thoughtlessness
Upon seeing this news report, I recalled philosopher Hannah Arendt’s words not merely as a “story from intellectual history,” but as a warning about the mechanisms of reality.
What Arendt saw through was that evil is not perpetrated by “monstrous, exceptional individuals,” but rather,
when people
stop thinking.
Stop questioning.
Tell themselves, “I’m just a cog in the machine.”
They stop thinking, thinking “it’s the rules.”
In this way, they dilute their responsibility.
As a result,
very great evil
is carried out with the face of very ordinary daily life, as “business as usual.”
From this news concerning the Japan Pension Service,
I feel I have seen the very structure of human organizations that Arendt discerned.
Transparency refers not to “disclosure” but to a “structure that can be stopped.”
Finally, what I want to convey is
the true meaning behind the phrase “should be made transparent.”
Transparency isn’t merely about
making documents public.
It’s about creating structures that can stop mistakes:
- Records that cannot be erased.
- Decision histories that can be traced.
- A formal process for lodging objections.
- Protection for insiders who correctly intervene.
These mechanisms must come first.
Only then do individual ethics and integrity hold meaning.
People change, all organizations decay, and frontline workers become exhausted, ground down by daily tasks.
That is why we must create systems
that do not depend on goodness.
As already stated, disability pensions
are a system directly tied to “life or death.”
If that system
was being quietly distorted from within,
it is not an individual problem.
It is a problem with the nation’s mechanisms.
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