The process of separating out those who will resign early and those who will stay in the ministry is called
kata-tataki
(the tap on the shoulder) or
mabiki
(thinning out). It is the responsibility of the vice-minister and the chief of the Secretariat, who are also responsible for finding the soon-to-be-retired officials good new positions on boards of directors. The final weeding out comes at the vice-ministerial level, when one man from one class is chosen by the outgoing vice-minister as his own replacement and when all the new vice-minister's classmates must resign to insure that he has absolute seniority in the ministry. The new vice-minister in turn devotes his efforts to seeing that these high-ranking retirees (and fellow classmates) get good amakudari landing spots. New positions for retiring vice-ministers are found for them by the minister and by the ministry's elder statesmen (sempai).
Competition in the maneuvering for high positions in a ministry normally occurs among classes and not individuals. For example, the 25 members of the class of May 1947 in the Ministry of Finance organized themselves as a club, the Satsuki Kai (May Club), which continued in amity for 31 years until 1978, when it had only one member left, Okura * Masataka, the director of the Tax Bureau.
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Even if not formally organized as a club, a class will sometimes meet and caucus as a body during periods of stress within a ministry in order to agree on common policies (the various classes in MITI met separately in 1963, at the time of Sahashi's initial failure to be appointed vice-minister, one of the big crises in MITI history, which I shall describe fully in Chapter 7).
Not every class can produce a vice-minister; if it did he could occupy the office for only a few months, which would greatly damage the effectiveness of a ministry's chief executive officer. Therefore, some classes have to be passed over. As a result of this factor, a chief of personnel in the Secretariat will sometimes attempt to remove promising members of rival classes from the competition in order to keep his own class in the running. Many of Sahashi's opponents have accused him of using his years as the personnel section chief to rig the succession. Whatever the case, the classes of 1935 and 1936, which lay between that of the outgoing vice-minister (1934) and Sahashi's own
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(1937), found their members all occupying terminal positions. The "loser years" in MITI were 1935, 1936, 1938, and 1942.
Each class has its "flowers" (
hana
)that is, candidates with strong credentials for the vice-ministershipand members of the class take pride in one of their comrades representing them at the top. For example, the
ju-hachi-nen
*
gumi no hana
(flowers of the class of 1943) at MITI were Sho* Kiyoshi, Yajima Shiro*, Miyake Yukio, and Yamashita Eimei. During 1973 Sho ended his MITI career as director-general of the Medium and Smaller Enterprises Agency, Miyake as director-general of the Patent Agency, Yajima as chief of the Heavy Industries Bureau, and Yamashita made it to the top as MITI vice-minister from July 1973 to November 1974. Needless to say, when one class produces two vice-ministersas happened twice in MITI (Ishihara Takeo and Ueno Koshichi*, both of the class of 1932, succeeded each other as vice-minister between 1955 and 1960; and Imai Zen'ei and Sahashi Shigeru, both of the class of 1937, succeeded each other as vice-minister between 1963 and 1966)great strains are imposed on the internal norms of ministerial life.
Before the war age grading existed, but it was not as rigorously enforced as after the war. When Yoshino Shinji (class of 1913) became vice-minister of the Ministry of Commerce and Industry in 1931 (he served in that office until 1936), he was only 43 years old and was promoted over several of his seniors. Moreover, at his personal request, one of his seniors (Nakamatsu Shinkyo*, class of 1908) remained on in the ministry as chief of the Patent Bureau for another five years. Within MITI the practice of all classmates or seniors resigning when a new vice-minister takes over appears to have originated in October 1941, when Kishi became minister and appointed Shiina vice-minister. Kishi and Shiina represented the Manchurian faction of promilitary bureaucrats in the ministry, and they had very definite ideas of what they wanted to do. Kishi asked all of Shiina's superiors, with whom both had disagreed on policy, to resign, and they did so.
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In the postwar world "respect for seniority" developed concomitantly with the tremendous expansion of the bureaucracy. It was needed to bring some definite order to the bureaucracy's internal personnel administration as well as to provide security for officials, who were significantly less well paid than before the war. As one measure of the bureaucracy's expansion, Watanabe calculates that whereas between 1894 and 1943 some 9,008 individuals passed the Higher-level (class A) Public Officials Examination, between 1948 and 1973 some 18,998 individuals did so.
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Not all bureaucrats like or approve of the system of age grading and
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forced early retirement. Sahashi has often denounced it as irrational, even though he was a past master at manipulating it. By the 1970's both the bureaucrats and the public were showing signs of irritation with the system. In 1974 an official rocked MITI by refusing to resign after he had been tapped and told it was time to go. Hayashi Shintaro *, spring class of 1947 and a Ph.D. in economics, had been chief of the Industrial Location and Environmental Protection Bureau for less than a year when he was asked to resign. Even though he had excellent job offers from private industry, he refused them on the grounds that his current work was important and that it was poor administration to change officials before they could even begin to be effective in their posts. Hayashi was liked in the ministry; he had become famous for developing the postwar Japanese sewing machine industry into a thriving export business, and he had served for several years in the JETRO office in West Germany, where he had studiedas MITI habitually puts it"how American capital overran the Western European economy."
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His refusal to resign won praise from some younger MITI officials and from the press. Nonetheless, he was reassigned to the Secretariat with no work to do and took a cut in pay. Shortly thereafter he resigned and became vice-president of Jasco Corporation, a big chain of retail stores in the Osaka and Nagoya regions.
In contrast to the views of Sahashi and Hayashi, Ojimi* Yoshihisa, a vice-minister, defends the system. He argues that strict rules of seniority and early retirement make Japan's top bureaucrats more youthful and energetic than those of other countries, and that because of their vigor they can generate more good new ideas. At the same time, the system of senior-junior (sempai-kohai*) relations, which extends beyond the period of bureaucratic service, ensures that their actions are watched by men with great experience.
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It should be added that an additional result of the system of early retirement and subsequent reemployment in big business or politics is another link between a ministry and its main clients. The practice of bureaucratic descent from heaven thus generates one more kind of factional tie among the central groups of Japanese societyfactions based on financial considerations (zaibatsu, in the nonspecific sense of the term).
As we have already seen, state bureaucrats in Japan retire early from government service and then obtain new employment in big business, public corporations, or politics. This practice is obviously open to abuse, and many Japanese commentators have charged that it has been abused. MITI reporters, for example, argue that a wise bureaucrat will use his years as a section chief to generate new ideas and put pressure on the business community to adopt them, but that as a