93
The Japanese government-business relationship does not always work as smoothly as it appears to on the surface. A major check to its effectiveness, one that often alters the various relationships within the establishment in unforeseen ways, is competition among ministrieswhat the Japanese call "sectionalism." Some observers believe that it is the most important characteristic of the Japanese government, either limiting its potential effectiveness or mitigating its enormous powers.
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To judge by the Japanese term commonly used to describe it
gun'yu
*
kakkyo
(the rivalry of local barons)one would think that the Japanese believe sectionalism is an inheritance from the samurai era. Certainly one demonstrable cause of sectionalism was the Meiji Constitution of 1889, with its provisions for "independent responsibility to the throne," meaning that ministers and their ministries were not accountable to the prime minister, the cabinet, or the Diet, but only to the Emperorand hence to no one but themselves. The drafters' intent was to prevent rivals to the oligarchs from coming to power and using the government against them, but the actual result was numerous instances in which the military ministries used their radical independence to defy all authority. And many scholars believe that the lack of coordination between the army, the navy, and the rest of the government during the Pacific War was a major cause of Japan's overwhelming defeat.
95
The Constitution of 1947 states that "executive power shall be vested in the Cabinet" (art. 65), and that "the Cabinet, in the exercise of executive power, shall be collectively responsible to the Diet" (art. 66). Nonetheless, the cabinet has no coordinating organs, and executive power has remained, as it was before the war, in the ministries. (Neither the Board of Audit nor the Cabinet Legislation Bureau, the two main staff organs attached to the cabinet, has supervisory or coordinating powers over the ministries.) A minister can no longer bring down a government simply by resigning, but the old traditions of intense independence and of rivalry persist. Sahashi Shigeru, a former MITI vice-minister, contends that on this score the cabinet sys-
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tem of 1885 continues unchanged in its essentials to the present. He concludes, "Bureaucrats are officials of the various ministries first and only second are they servants of the nation."
96
The postwar expansion of the bureaucracy followed by efforts to reduce its size reinforced this tradition. A bureaucrat's security and livelihood became dependent on maintaining or expanding his ministry's jurisdiction. Shrinking jurisdictions threaten not only the bureaucrats' active-duty positions but also their amakudari prospects, since a ministry needs clients and captive organizations to hire those of its retired members who do not have readily marketable skills. Tradition and circumstances thus produce an intense "territorial consciousness" (
nawabari ishiki
), punctuatedin Sakakibara's wordsby "gangster-like struggles over jurisdiction" (
yakuza no nawabari arasoi
) throughout the state bureaucracy.
97
Whatever the issue, bureaucrats' willingness to fight to defend the interests of their service has a marked delaying and distorting effect on Japanese governmental policy. Many decisions of the Japanese government are incomprehensible to the outside observer unless he or she understands the bureaucratic interests at stake and the compromises that these interests necessitate. In 1974, for example, when Prime Minister Tanaka proposed the creation of an overseas economic cooperation ministry, warfare among the existing ministries burst into the open. MITI had already tried to get written into the 1974 budget a proposal for a "mining and manufacturing overseas trade development corporation," and Agriculture wanted an "overseas agriculture and forestry development corporation." They were actively competing with each other for a share of what looked like an expansion of Japan's economic aid activities. Foreign Affairs promptly objected that it already had two agencies under its jurisdiction that had purposes similar to the proposed ministry. Prime Minister Tanaka ultimately decided on a ministry that would incorporate the two Foreign Affairs agencies but include MITI and Agriculture in their management. Foreign Affairs fought on and finally accepted the new International Cooperation Agency of August 1974 only when it was agreed that it would
not
be a ministry and that a foreign office official would head it.
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When Tanaka was prime minister he also promised in his reelection campaign to create a Medium and Smaller Enterprises Ministry, just as a few years later Prime Minister Fukuda promised to create an Energy Ministry and a Housing Ministry. Regardless of whether this proliferation of ministries would have been a good idea, the reason that none of them ever saw the light of day was not substantive objections but ministerial resistance. MITI mobilized the Agriculture and
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Welfare ministries to stop the medium and smaller enterprises proposal by arguing that they, too, would lose some jurisdiction, to say nothing of MITI itself. MITI and the Ministry of Construction stopped the energy and housing ideas by utilizing their old boy networks, since neither ministry wanted to lose the petroleum and housing businesses as places for their officials to retire.
The longest continuing struggle in the Japanese government, dating from well before the war, has been over the attempt to take control of the budget away from the Ministry of Finance in order to lodge it in the cabinet or some supraministerial coordinating agency. In 1955 Kono * Ichiro* conceived of an independent budget bureau; in 1963 the Temporary Administrative Investigation Council recommended creation of a system of cabinet assistants to oversee the budget; and in 1970 Kawashima Shojiro* called for the establishment of an Overall Planning Agency (Sogo* Kikaku-cho*). The Ministry of Finance successfully beat back all these proposals. Regardless of what the constitution says, the coordinating power of the Japanese executive branch is exercised through the three annual budgets (general account, special accounts, and government investment), and control over them is in the hands of the Budget Bureau and the Financial Bureau of the Ministry of Finance.
The
Asahi
argues that, because of ministerial rivalry, in foreign affairs Japan can never create a monolithic negotiating positionwhich is not necessarily a bad thing. Contention often develops among Foreign Affairs, Finance, and MITI during any major international negotiations. Each of them maintains its own overseas communications networkForeign Affairs through the regular foreign office cable system, Finance through the telex system of the Bank of Tokyo, and MITI through the telex system of JETRO. According to the
Asahi
, Japan actually has three foreign services, each of them with different policies and each represented overseas. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs is the most internationalist, MITI has historically been protectionist, and the Finance Ministry is fairly internationalist but stingy about spending money for defense or foreign aid. Policy is a result of compromises among these positions, and the compromises change as the power positions of the three ministries shift with political developments.