Amakudari

The name of a Klingon battleship in Star Trek. And it's a Japanese term for a practice of highly-ranked civil servants getting moved into high-paying, lower-stress executive positions. The term translates to "descent from heaven."

The system goes back at least to the Imperial days in Japan prior to WWII. The basic process goes like this:

As people make their way through the various bureaucracies that make up a sizable part of Japanese society, they have to fight for promotions. Moving through their careers and getting closer to the top of the bureaucratic pyramid, the number of potential jobs gets fewer and fewer. In the top levels, if a person loses a fight for a promotion, they are expected to resign from whatever organization they work for, basically so that a former rival isn't hanging around during a new boss's reign.

The losers of these fights are the ones that benefit from amakudari. Their consolation prize for getting the short end of the power struggle (and taking that loss admirably) is getting installed in some plum position somewhere else. It's kind of like the American concept of a golden parachute...another soft descent from heaven.