This triangular relationship sometimes looks conflict ridden and sometimes consensual, but both impressions are deceptive according to Kawanaka Niko*, who maintains that interest groups representing the strategic industrieshe calls them the "prime contractor groups"always hold a privileged relationship with the bureaucracy. The two will sometimes be in conflict, however, with private indus-
Page 51
trial groups or enterprises asking for flexible execution of governmental policies or for partial or technical changes in policies that will benefit one or another of them. The government will be forthcoming, seeking compromises, brokering mergers, offering financial incentives, confronting foreign competitors, and so forth, but the government will also impose on the industries new conditions that are conducive to the government's goals. This conflict is important and time-consuming, but according to Kawanaka it should always be understood as
miuchi
(among relatives).
In the case of outsidersfor example, consumer groups, local conservationists, or groups hostile to the alliance with the United Statesthe government's policy is to ignore them, or if they become very powerful, to seek a compromise with them through the LDP. The Japanese people understand these relationships and support them not as a matter of principle but because of the results they have achieved. They have developed what Kawanaka labels a "structure of organizational double vision," by which he means the tendency for subordinate or dependent parts of the structure to perceive the intentions of the dominant or guiding parts and to formulate their own policies as if the superior's policies were their own. It all looks like consensus to outsiders, but it is, in fact, dictated by a calculation of the balance of forces and a sense of Japan's vulnerability. Rather than consensus, Kawanaka proposes the concept of "interlocking decision-making," which acknowledges the symbiotic relationships among the bureaucracy, LDP, and the business community. The characteristics of such interlocking decisions, he suggests, are bureaucratic leadership, obscured responsibility, and fictive kinship ties.
49
An even more important characteristic for our purposes is a differential access to the government by various groups: the "prime contractors" and vital political support groups have ready access, the less strategically placed groups little accessalthough more than they had under the Meiji Constitution. The channels of preferential access are not formalized, but they exist in the deliberation councils, in a circulation of elites from the bureaucracy to both the political and industrial worlds, and in a vast array of other "old boy" networks to be discussed below. The result is a developmental state much softer and more tolerable than the communist-dominated command economies (with much better performance, too) but with a considerably greater goal-setting and goal-achieving capability than in the market-rational systems.
Personal relations between bureaucrats and politicians in this subtle, malleable system can be quite complex. In each ministry there is
Page 52
only one genuine political appointee, the minister, who is named by the prime minister and is a member of the cabinet. The minister is normally but not invariably a member of the Diet (articles 67 and 68 of the Constitution of 1947 require that the prime minister be elected by and from the members of the Diet, but only a majority of the other ministers must be members). All other officials in a ministry are nonpolitical, the most senior being the administrative vice-minister (
jimu jikan
, which I have rendered simply as "vice-minister"). The Japanese prime minister thus has the power to name only about 20 ministers, plus 4 party officials, whereas the American president, for example, appoints at least 1,000 people to posts in the bureaucracy (one Japanese analyst counted 916 bureaucratic appointments made by President Carter during early 1977).
50
The prime minister is also guided by the political need to balance factions within the LDP and only rarely by the qualifications of a politician for a particular ministerial post.
*
The Japanese bureaucracy jealously guards the practice of making no political appointments below the ministerial level; the bureaucrats believe that this helps establish their claim to be above politics and to speak only for the national interest. One of the bureaucracy's greatest fears is "political interference" in its internal affairs or, worse, a ministry's being made subservient to a party or a politician. Even though the minister is legally in command of and responsible for everything that happens in a ministry, a delicate relationship between him and the vice-minister inevitably exists from the outset. The norm is for the minister to fear his bureaucrats and to be dominated by them; one journalist suggests that the only time a minister ever enjoys his post is on the day he is photographed in formal dress at the Imperial Palace as part of the cabinet's investiture ceremony.
51
If this norm prevails, the bureaucrats are satisfied. But what they really want is a minister who will leave them alone while at the same time taking responsibility for the ministry and protecting it from intrusion by other politicians or
*
The secretary-general of the LDPone of the 4 party leaders under the party president (who is simultaneously the prime minister)appoints an additional 24 parliamentary vice-ministers, 2 (1 for each house) in the ministries of Finance, Agriculture and Forestry, and International Trade and Industry, and 1 in each of the other ministries. These vice-ministers are supposed to provide liaison between the ministries and the Diet, but "the posts' chief attraction is that they furnish the politicians a chance to use the ministry's facilities to do favors for their constituents (thus bettering themselves in the elections), and for other politicians (thus bettering themselves in the party)." See Nathaniel B. Thayer,
How the Conservatives Rule Japan
(Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1969), p. 279. The
Mainichi
observes that, like an appendix in a human body, the parliamentary vice-ministers do not seem to perform a vital function. They are invariably appointed with an eye to rewarding factions within the party and not to the effective functioning of either the bureaucracy or the Diet. See
Japan Times
, May 7, 1974, and December 27, 1975.
Page 53
outside interests, particularly business interests. And this requires that a minister be a powerful politicianwho may have ideas of his own. If he is also a former bureaucrat, perhaps even one from the ministry to which he has been appointed, the relationship can get quite complex.
Ministry of Finance officials claim to fear powerful ministers from their own service, men such as Kaya Okinori, Ikeda Hayato, or Fukuda Takeo.
52
Ikeda, in particular, was always an activist minister in whatever ministry he headed; and he became famous for shaking up the Ministry of Finance in order to remove fiscal conservatives who were blocking his plans for rapid economic growth, and also in order to enlist the ministry in support of his own political ambitions.
53
The trade and industry bureaucrats generally liked Ikeda when he was MITI minister, largely because they agreed with him, but when they disagreedas for example over the pace of trade liberalization in 1960he won. He also once gave orders that MITI men could not talk to the press without his approval because he was tired of reading in the newspapers about new economic initiatives that he knew nothing about.