keto
* ("hairy Chinese," by extension "unpleasant foreigner") to refer to Japan's competitors.
115
A different perspective is suggested by the former vice-minister Sahashi Shigeru's habitual use of the literary prefix
hei
, meaning "our" in a humble sensea form of expression associated with an
obanto
*, the chief clerk of an old mercantile house or a prewar zaibatsu holding company. When Sahashi spoke of
heikoku
(our country) as if he were a clerk referring to
heisha
(our company), many Japanese thought of him as the obanto* of Japanese capitalism.
116
Nagai Yonosuke* sees still another historical paralleclass="underline" "With its self-assertiveness, its strong native nationalism, its loyalist posture, . . . and its terrific 'workism,' MITI reminds us of the General Staff Office of the defunct army.''
117
Whatever its roots, MITI's "spirit" has become legendary.
A part of the MITI perspective is impatience with the Anglo-American doctrine of economic competition. After the war MITI had to reconcile itself to the occupation-fostered market system in Japan, but it has always been hostile to American-style price competition and antitrust legislation. Sahashi likes to quote Schumpeter to the effect that the competition that really counts in capitalist systems is not measured by profit margins but by the development of new commodities, new technologies, new sources of supply, and new types of organizations.
118
MITI is highly competitive internationally, but it is often irritated by the disorderly competitive scramble among its domestic clients. As Robert Ozaki says, "Sometimes it is assumed [by MITI] that the adverse effects of private monopoly will not arise if the monopolists are Japanese."
119
During the 1970's many of these old MITI attitudes were modified by a new "internationalism." Nonetheless, Japanese commentators such as Kakuma have some reservations about the depth of the change; he calls the new MITI leadership the "nationalist international faction" and refers to the coming of the "age of the cosmopolitan nationalists."
120
MITI men are powerful and outspoken, and the Japanese public enjoys reading about them. Several best-selling novels have been written about them, the best of which is Shiroyama Saburo's*
The Summer of the Bureaucrats
(
Kanryo-tachi
*
no natsu
) of 1975. English novelists sometimes choose bureaucrats as subjects (examples are Maugham's
Ashenden
or le Carré's
Smiley's People
), but economic bureaucrats in
Page 82
America or Britain are rarely as interesting as spies or politicians. The opposite is true in Japan, where the power and influence of economic bureaucrats make fictional portrayals of their lives and struggles intriguing. In order to understand in greater depth why the Japanese find such people worth reading about in their newspapers and novels, we turn next to a history of the men and accomplishments of MITI.
Page 83
Three
The Rise of Industrial Policy
Old trade and industry bureaucrats, looking back on their extraordinary history, like to note that the number 14 has figured prominently in their karma. The Ministry of Agriculture and Commerce (MAC; Noshomu-sho *) was created in the fourteenth year of Meiji, or 1881; the Ministry of Commerce and Industry (MCI; Shoko-sho*) was created in the fourteenth year of Taisho*, or 1925; and the organization of MCI into vertical bureaus, one for each strategic industry, was introduced in the fourteenth year of Showa*, or 1939.
During December 1924, on the eve of the second of these landmark dates, three men sat working in the temporary quarters of MAC in the offices of the Japanese Chamber of Commerce and Industry in Otemachi*, Tokyo. Their regular offices had been leveled by the earthquake of 1923. The highly political and bureaucratic task they were attending to, and even the fact that these three men were in charge of it, had as much to do with karma as with any policies or intentions of their own. They were dividing the old Ministry of Agriculture and Commerce into two new ministriesAgriculture and Forestry (Norin-sho*) and Commerce and Industry. The three men were Shijo* Takafusa (18761936), then vice-minister of agriculture and commerce; Yoshino Shinji (18881971), chief of the Documents Section (Bunsho-kacho*); and Kishi Nobusuke (b. 1896), a young official in the Documents Section who had entered the ministry only four years earlier after graduating at the head of his class at Tokyo University's Law School.
These were three very different men, but each would have a significant impact on Japan, particularly through the influence he would have on his juniors. Shijo was one of Yoshino's most important pa-
Page 84
trons, Yoshino was one of Kishi's most important patrons, and Kishi was destined to become prime minister of Japan at the time of high-speed growth. Yoshino and Kishi together would establish Japan's first genuine industrial policy. The two younger men would also rise not just to the highest bureaucratic post in their service, vice-minister, but to the ministry's highest political post, minister of commerce and industry. But in 1924 none of them could have had the slightest suspicion of what was to come; all they were doing was arranging their rather untaxing bureaucratic lives to suit themselveshelping their friends, getting rid of people who irritated them, and taking advantage of a political change that did not affect them personally much at all.
The break-up of the Ministry of Agriculture and Commerce had been long in coming. Petitions calling for a separate agriculture ministry had been introduced in the Diet every year since 1918; and after the "rice riots" of the same year the issue had assumed major political significance. Equally important, with the emergence of the governments based on political parties that followed the passing of most of the Meiji oligarchs, genuine pressure groups were beginning to have a profound effect on Japanese governmental policy. Although in essence agricultural interests and their political allies were kicking commerce out of the Ministry of Agriculture and Commerce, the leaders of commercial administration were quite pleased to see this happen, particularly since they were in a position to execute the details of the split. The situation was somewhat comparable to the division in 1913 in the United States of the old Department of Commerce and Labor into two separate departmentsat the insistence of the American Federation of Labor and not of business interests.
1
The old Japanese ministry that was being divided had itself developed out of a basic change in Meiji economic policy that took place in 1880. After a decade of direct governmental investment in mines, railroads, arsenals, and factories, the Meiji leaders had had to confront the unpleasant fact that the new government of Japan could not afford to continue what it had been doing. The side effects of its policies were inflation, trade deficits, corruption, and looming bankruptcy. Liberal economists of the time such as Taguchi Ukichi, who wrote for the
Tokyo
*
keizai zasshi
(Tokyo economic journal), urged the government to control inflation by selling off its state enterprises and turn instead to the sponsorship of private capitalism.
Within the government the new minister of finance, Matsukata Masayoshi, agreed; and on November 5, 1880, he issued his famous "Outline Regulations for the Sale of Government-operated Facto-