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He did not, however, interfere in ministerial personnel affairs.
Ikeda represented the unusual case of an ex-bureaucrat being an activist minister. Although somewhat trying for bureaucrats, such types do not pose a real threat to them. Much more serious are activist ministers from a party politician's (tojinha*) background. Their efforts to exert influence over a ministry can set off shock waves throughout Japanese politics that reverberate for years; details of cases in which this has occurred are repeated in every Japanese book on the central government. Probably the most famous case is that of Kono* Ichiro* (18981965) and his efforts to bring the Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry under his personal control.
Kono was an old follower of Hatoyama Ichiro in the prewar Seiyukai*. After his depurge in 1951 he returned to politics as an opponent of Yoshida's bureaucratic mainstream. With the unification of the two conservative parties into the LDP, he served as minister of agriculture and forestry in the first Hatoyama cabinet, as director-general of the Economic Planning Agency in the first Kishi cabinet, and as agriculture minister and then construction minister in the second and third Ikeda cabinets. As minister of construction in 1964, he was in charge of the Tokyo Olympics, Japan's debut on the postwar world scene as a rising economic power. After Ikeda's death Kono led a major effort by the combined tojinha to seize control of the party, but he was defeated by Sato* Eisaku and died shortly thereafter.
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When Kono * first became minister of agriculture in December 1954, he intervened powerfully in the internal personnel affairs of the ministry. His instrument was a bureaucrat named Yasuda Zen'ichiro*, whom he promoted to the post of chief of the Secretariat (in the Ministry of Agriculture, the last step before the vice-ministership and the position responsible for all ministerial appointments) over the heads of many of his seniors. Yasuda then transferred or demoted bureaucrats who did not support Kono. Yasuda was a willing participant in these operations because he hoped to have a political career himself, after retirement, as Kono's* protégé. He ended his bureaucratic service as chief of the Agriculture Ministry's Food Agency (July 1961 to January 1962), and then stood for and lost election to the lower house as a member of the Kono faction.
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Other ministries point to him as a prime example of the disasters that can befall a bureaucrat and a ministry if its members break ranks and allow a politician to use one of them for his own purposes.
Agriculture is often said to be the first ministry to have been "politicized" by the LDP because of the LDP's dependence on the farm vote. However, agriculture ministries are rarely "nonpolitical" in any country. At least one other ministry in Japan, Education, has always been under tight LDP control because of the party's ideological struggle with the communist-dominated teachers' union; there has never been even a pretense of bureaucratic independence at Education. As for MITI, over the years since its creation in 1949, prime ministers and ministers have attempted to gain control and use it for political purposes. MITI bureaucrats have been implacable in their resistance to these efforts, often citing the negative example of Kono and agriculture. We shall analyze some of these MITI cases in detail later in this book, since they have often influenced the basic industrial policies of the ministry.
Some party politician ministers, even activist ones, have been welcomed at MITI because of their effectiveness in getting things done in the Diet: Tanaka Kakuei, Nakasone Yasuhiro, and Komoto* Toshio are examples. Even when relations are good, however, the bureaucrats have in the back of their minds the danger of corruption when dealing with nonbureaucratic party politicians (corruption charges have been brought in postwar Japan against ex-bureaucrat politicians, but they have usually been make to stick only in the case of tojinha* politicians). If a minister should attempt to name the vice-minister (by custom the outgoing MITI vice-minister names his own successor) or otherwise alter the internal norms of bureaucratic life, warfare is inevitable. MITI officials have been known to cancel ministerial confer-
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ences or to declare them private gatherings when parliamentary viceministers insisted on attending.
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From MITI's point of view, the ideal minister was someone like Shiina Etsusaburo* (18981979), an old trade and industry bureaucrat who had no desire to intervene in ministerial affairs and who was also a powerful LDP politician and an effective Diet debater (in the Japanese context, this means a politician who can speak politely and at length without actually saying anything of substancean art that Shiina had mastered). In general, prewar ministers had more influence over their ministries than postwar ministers, a change that again reflects the rise in bureaucratic power in the postwar era.
Although relations between bureaucrats and politicians are understandably delicate in the Japanese political system, the focus of bureaucratic life is within the ministry itselfand there informal norms and their occasional violation generate real passion. Landau and Stout remind us that "bureaucracies are fusions of artificially contrived and naturally developed systems. Apart from their formal properties, they are characterized by interest groups, personal networks, patron-client relations, brokers, and derivative coalitions."
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These informal ties sustain an organization's "culture," helping it to function effectively by inspiring loyalty, easing communications problems, socializing newcomers, generating new ideas in the clash of values and so forth. Throughout this book I shall be dealing with MITI's fabricated propertiesabove all with the famous industry-specific vertical bureaus that were its formal organization from 1939 to 1973but it is the informal practices and traditions that give life to an organization and that make its formal organization interesting.
Kusayanagi Daizo* argues that all human relations in Japanese society are based on four kinds of "factions" (
batsu
):
keibatsu
(family and matrimonial cliques),
kyodobatsu
* (clansmen, or persons from the same locality),
gakubatsu
(school and university classmates), and
zaibatsu
("factions based on money," an indefinite use of the term that should not be confused with its specific reference to the family-dominated industrial empires, or zaibatsu, of prewar Japan).
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All of these occur in the bureaucracy, but the first two are of minor significance and can be dealt with speedily.
Evidence of keibatsu can be found in MITI. To cite a few examples, Hatoyama Michio, formerly a physicist in MITI's Industrial Technology Institute and after retirement head of Sony's technical department, is married to the second daughter of former Prime Minister Hatoyama Ichiro*. The wife of Takashima Setsuo, who retired from MITI in 1969 after serving as vice-minister of the Economic Planning Agency, is the
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daughter of Kuroda Nagamichi, a former Imperial chamberlain. And Masuda Minoru, director-general of MITI's Natural Resources and Energy Agency in 1975, became a nephew through marriage of Nagano Shigeo, former president of Fuji Steel and one of the great industrial leaders of postwar Japan. Many other examples could be cited.