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The headquarters of a ministry engaged in interministerial struggles is, of course, its home office in the Kasumigaseki district of Tokyo. But in addition to its home office staff and its various old boy networks, client organizations, deliberation councils, and public corporations, each ministry has "assets" (
kabu
) spread throughout the government in the form of transferees, or what the French call
dé
-
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tachés
. The old-line ministries engage in a relentless contest to capture and control the more vulnerable agencies of the government through the sending of
détachés
. Their primary targets are the independent agencies attached to the prime minister's office, each of which is headed by an appointed minister of state (
kokumu daijin
): The Defense Agency, the Economic Planning Agency, the Science and Technology Agency, the Environment Agency, the National Land Agency, and a few others. The transferees who staff these agencies make up what the press calls expeditionary armies, which are quite regularly committed by their ministries to the "battles for the outposts" that are a serious part of the Japanese policy-making process.
The case of the Economic Planning Agency (EPA) has been the most widely studied and reported.
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Suffice it to say that MITI and the Ministry of Finance both hold strong positions at the EPAMITI controls its vice-ministership (since the 1960's a prestigious terminal appointment within the MITI personnel hierarchy) and the head of its Coordination Bureau, together with several section chief positions; Finance names its chief secretary and some important section chiefs. The positions MITI controls are valuable to it because through them it is able to place its own representatives on the Bank of Japan's Policy Board and on the deliberation council that supervises the Ministry of Finance's trust fund accounts, which are used to fund the investment budget.
As for the EPA itself, it has come to be known as a "colony agency," or a "branch store of MITI." It has no operating functions, but only writes reportshence its other nickname of the "composition agency."
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EPA's forecasts and indicative plans are read not so much for their accuracy or econometric sophistication as for official statements of what industries the government is prepared to finance or guarantee for the immediate future. Some Japanese economists believe that it is precisely this EPA function of indicating the government's intentions regarding the economy that gives rise to the "typically Japanese phenomenon" of excessive competition: excessive competition does not exist in all industries but only in those industries in which the government has expressed an interestand in which, as a result, the risks are greatly reduced.
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However, the quality of the EPA's main product, the annual Economic White Paper, has been affected by its colony status: in 1970 MITI prevented it from saying that the Yawata-Fuji steel merger (which produced New Japan Steel) could lead to monopolistic price increases, and in 1971 the Finance Ministry stopped any mention of the inflationary effects of the Bank of Japan's dollar buying following the Nixon shocks.
103
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The Defense Agency illustrates a different facet of the struggle for the outposts. Japan's postwar armed forces originated late in the occupation era as the National Police Reserve Force; in 1954 the Police Reserve was expanded, placed under the newly created Defense Agency, and renamed the Self-Defense Forces. In the same year a new national Police Agency was established. Since the civilian leaders of the Police Reserve had come from the old Home Ministry line of descent, and since the new Police Agency inherited the old Home Ministry's national police functions, it was natural that the Police Agency should continue supplying the civilian bureaucrats to staff the new Defense Agency. The first chief of the Police Reserve and the first vice-minister of the Defense Agency was Masuhara Keikichi, who held the post from August 1952 to June 1957. Masuhara was an old Home Ministry bureaucrat (Todai * law, 1928; chief of the Yamagata prefectural police in 1940). The top positions in the uniformed service of Japan's new armed forces went to former military officers, but until the 1970's all the top Defense executive positions were held by Police Agency transferees.
However, the Police Agency ran into trouble holding on to its bureaucratic turf because its predecessors did not recruit many new officials during the key class years of 1948 to 1952. The Ministry of Finance, on the other hand, took in about 50 successful examinees in 1947 and 1948 each, and from 40 to 50 during each of the years 194953. By the middle of the 1970's the Finance Ministry was under heavy pressure to find positions for some of these now high-ranking officials, and the Defense Agency looked promising. In June 1974 the Finance Ministry finally succeeded in placing Tashiro Kazumasa, formerly of the Finance Ministry's Secretariat, as the vice-minister of defense. Even though defense issues were becoming increasingly important to the Japanese during the 1970's, the Defense Agency itself was preoccupied by the Police-Finance struggle. The real losers in this fight, as at the EPA, were the pure defense bureaucrats, those who went to the Defense Agency directly from the university.
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MITI maintains a modest but choice portfolio at Defense: it controls the chief of the Equipment Bureau position and the main defense equipment section. The Welfare, Postal Services, Labor, and Foreign Affairs ministries also have one or two section chief positions under their control in the Defense Agency.
The case of the Environment Agency (Kankyo-cho*), set up in 1971 after the famous "pollution Diet" of 1970 had greatly strengthened the environmental protection laws, is a classic of the established ministries staking out claims in newly opened-up territory. The Environ-
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ment Agency's staff was fixed initially at 500 officials, and some twelve different ministries and agencies supplied them. The Welfare Ministry headed the list with 283, then Agriculture with 61, MITI with 26, the Economic Planning Agency with 21, and so forth. The fighting over the leadership posts was fierce. Welfare won it when the vice-minister of Welfare himself transferred to the new agency as its vice-minister. Welfare also captured two bureau chief positions and the position of chief of the Secretariat. Finance and Agriculture split the two remaining bureau directorships, and MITI got only a councillor's slot (
shingikan
). Of the 21 sections in the Environment Agency, Welfare names the chief of 7, MITI 3, Economic Planning and Agriculture 2 each, and Finance, Construction, Home, Labor, Police, Transport, and the Prime Minister's Office 1 each.
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Watanabe notes that ''this pattern is true for all newly created agencies."
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The struggle for nawabari (literally, "roped-off areas") is one of the passions of the Japanese bureaucracy. However, this may well be one of the hidden, if unintended, strengths of the Japanese system. As Hollerman argues, "If 'the government' of Japan were actually a highly coordinated set of agencies, its powers could be applied with overwhelming force. Instead, partly as a result of sheer ambition for status and partly as a result of divergent interests within the society itself, there is intense rivalry and jealousy among the ruling agencies and their personnel. In competing for power, they tend to neutralize one another's authority to some extent."