Well yeah, that seems to be what the Japanese government's reasoning: they want to form technically able people that will make money and be useful to their nation, while ridding them of such encumbering things as the ability to think or understand how politics, societies and human beings work.
I personally loathe the idea of reducing education to 'what is useful for the work market'. Your future job is not the end goal of your life. The goal of education is to make you a decent and cultivated human being, able to think by himself.
I highly doubt Japan is THAT much in a dire need of money, these departments don't cost nearly as much as scientific departments and their costly equipment. The real reason is probably that Japan is trying to get themselves back an army and are pouring more budget into that instead.
And let's get the Godwin point done with: repressing social sciences and humanities while reinforcing the army is one of the recurrent symptoms of a nascent totalitarian state.
Wag reacted to Down in Japanese government asks universities to close social science and humanities departments