The objective of this article is to provide a critical view on the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) and post-MDGs discussion, particularly in the context of Japanese ODA. The article examines how Japanese ODA adopts a new international norm of MDGs which was formulated at the outset of the 21^st century as a common ethical and practical tool for enhancing development commitment of the international society.

This was a significant shift in the policy agenda for international development because the MDGs, the set of eight goals with quantitative targets to be achieved by 2015 in areas of income poverty, hunger, gender equality, education, environment, health and survival, and global partnerships, have garnered unprecedented consensus and commitment to ending poverty. Furthermore, the MDGs seek to apply a ‘result-oriented approach’ to human development aiming at directly improving human lives and implicitly spell out that ‘growth is not enough’ for poverty to be ended. However, while the MDGs reflect implicitly this ambitious agenda, they are intertwined with full of political compromises because they had to seek to gain the approval of the entire UN membership - 189 countries in very different economic, social and political circumstances. Therefore, it is said that the MDGs could not adequately address governance and accountability issues, and thus they had distracted people from the structural causes of poverty. Simplicity of the MDGs helps national governments to appropriate them for their own political interests other than poverty reduction per se.

This article argues that Japan intentionally or unintentionally fails to adopt ‘true value’ of the MDGs for their ODA program while it ostensibly express political commitment at some policy statements. After the scrutinisation of all the outline papers of Japanese ODA projects presented for the examination at the Committee for Appropriate Development Cooperation in Japan, it reveals that Japan continues to provide large-scale infrastructure projects based on economic growth-oriented approach that are rather compatible with Japan's national interests but hardly accountable for poor people in developing countries.