Whatever plans they have for Mr Koizumi, the mandarins cannot escape that uncomfortable truth.
On the contrary, the mandarins are not even prepared to admit there is anything wrong.
With the LDP's blessing, the mandarins made policy, to be rubber-stamped by the cabinet.
This role has little political content, yet ministers remain accountable for the mandarins' performance.
Business lobbied for contracts and support by pouring money into the party's coffers and the mandarins' pockets.
In return for awarding a licence, the mandarins have felt obliged to keep the beneficiary in business.
But even if Mr Koizumi's reforms do fail, the mandarins have surely entered a long twilight in Japan.
They would rightly fear bureaucratic hostility to change, after the mandarins' recent outburst.
Few are shedding tears for the mandarins of college leagues, who have built a multi-billion-dollar conglomerate on the backs of unpaid labour.
As a political event, it appeared to signal, with the injection of brutal Wall Street methods, a new realism among the mandarins in Tokyo.
First, the mandarins want to be in charge of their own reform, a principle that the politicians have honoured in all administrative reforms up to now.
This week, the Nihon Keisai, Japan's main business daily, reported that the mandarins want to eliminate many tax exemptions, such as those for loss-making companies and reserves set aside for bonuses, to offset the proposed 2.5 percentage point reduction in the nominal tax rate.
Sensibly, the top mandarins are planning to keep the exercise in-house without the bother of external assessment by a watchdog like the Audit Commission.
The BCCI mandarins feel that they have taken due cognisance of the "crime" after a "proper" investigation of their own and the bans were not imposed merely on basis of the CBI report.
Our economy is not managed by Washington mandarins the way Japan's still is by Tokyo mandarins.
Given the myriad of other reasons to limit human fertility (Dr Potts notes, for example, that slowing population growth is essential if poverty is to be eradicated), your correspondent cannot help but commend the report to mandarins meeting in Bangkok on September 28th to discuss the forthcoming United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen.
ECONOMIST: Fewer people would mean lower greenhouse-gas emissions
Our economy is not managed by Washington mandarins the way Tokyo's still is.
The ruling party and finance ministry mandarins are now replaying the old goso sendan, or convoy system, in which good and bad banks cooperate to drift along in tandem.
And among parents, the much-celebrated obsession with achievement and education also generally favored by Mandarins around the region tends to make child-bearing seem ever more onerous and expensive.
FORBES: Decline Of The Asian Family: Drop In Marriages, Births, Threatens Economic Ascendancy
What is evident is that the relations between ministers and mandarins are at a crisis, in the strict medical sense of that word: that is to say, they are at a point at which they will either get better, or drastically worse.
Mattson hints at a respectful longing for such bygone mandarins of the commentariat as Walter Lippmann and Stewart Alsop.
Makiko Tanaka, the foreign minister at the time, accused Mr Suzuki, an excitable politician from Hokkaido, a northern island, who appears to have great sway with mandarins in the foreign ministry, of blocking the aid groups (supposedly because they had criticised the government) and tampering in ministry matters.
And, to the chagrin of his father's ageing mandarins, when King Mohammed moves among the crowds, he holds out his hand hoping it will be shaken, not kissed.
Many of Washington's mandarins now appreciate the fact that much of the violence in the region arises from popular frustration at political repression rather than miserable economic conditions.
Our Treasury mandarins forget that the inflation we suffer at home will cost us more than whatever temporary advantage we gain on our trade accounts from a devalued dollar.
But Mrs Tanaka is still hugely popular with the voters, who admire her sharp tongue, quick wits and penchant for abusing the foreign ministry's haughty mandarins.
It will study the system in New Zealand, where mandarins sign a contract setting out expectations.
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