107
On the other hand, Sakakibara, himself an ex-bureaucrat, defends what he calls the vertical organization of the bureaucracy because of the discipline and solidarity it instills in officials. Rather than committing themselves to some abstract ideal, they join a "family" when they enter an old-line ministry. Given its semilifetime employment system and its vertical organization, each ministry must create sufficient public corporations, affiliated associations of clients (
gaikaku dantai
), and colonial outposts for its retired and soon-to-retire seniors. These commitments cause a ministry to become a "welfare community," which in turn becomes an object of affection for its members and not merely an impersonal office.
108
Efforts at administrative reform in Japan have occasionally produced a reduction in personnel or the abolition of a grossly superfluous unit, but they have never affected the vertical structure.
MITI itself, as the descendant of one of the original ministries dating back to 1881, is certainly a "welfare community," but it also has several characteristics that distinguish it from the other economic bu-
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reaucracies. It is the smallest of the economic ministries in terms of personnel, and it controls the smallest share of the general account budget. This last feature is important because it frees MITI from the commanding influence of the Finance Ministry's Budget Bureau, which all the other ministries must cultivate. MITI exercises control over money through its ability to approve credit or authorize expenditures by the Japan Development Bank, the Electric Power Development Company, the Export-Import Bank, the Smaller Business Finance Corporation, the Bank for Commerce and Industrial Cooperatives, the Japan Petroleum Development Corporation, and the Productivity Headquarters, all of which are public corporations that it controlsor in which its views are decisive.
109
Although MITI's official budget in fiscal 1956, for example, was only ¥8.2 billion, the MITI Press Club concluded that the ministry actually supervised the spending of some ¥160.9 billion.
110
MITI's internal pecking order is different from that in other ministries. Although most of its vice-ministers have served as chiefs of one of the sections in the Secretariat, the Secretariat itself is not the final spotor "waiting room" (
machiai-shitsu
)for the vice-ministership, as it is in other ministries. The internal MITI rank order is as follows:
1. vice-minister
2. chief, Industrial Policy Bureau (before 1973, the Enterprises Bureau, which was created in 1942)
3. director-general, Natural Resources and Energy Agency
4. director-general, Medium and Smaller Enterprises Agency
5. director-general, Patent Agency
6. chief, International Trade Policy Bureau
7. chief, Machinery and Information Industries Bureau
8. chief, Minister's Secretariat
9. chief, Basic Industries Bureau
10. chief, Industrial Location and Environmental Protection Bureau
11. chief, Consumer Goods Industries Bureau
12. chief, Trade Bureau (the old Trade Promotion Bureau)
111
The high status of the Industrial Policy Bureau is a reflection of the internal factional fighting that has gone on continuously within the ministry since it was reorganized in 1949. In this fighting, which was between the industrial faction (also called the "control" or "domestic" faction) and the international faction (also called the "trade" or "liberal" faction), the industrial faction and its policies dominated the ministry until 1966, and its headquarters was the Industrial Policy Bureau. During the 1970's a new breed of internationalists took over the
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ministry and ended the earlier disputes, but the management of industrial policy has remained the hallmark of MITI. It is because of this that the directorship of the Industrial Policy Bureau is the last step before the vice-ministership.
MITI also differs from other ministries in the degree of internal democracy it supports and in the authority it gives to younger officials. The ministry believes that the most fertile time in the life of a bureaucrat for generating new ideas is when he serves as assistant section chief (
kacho-hosa
*). MITI tries to tap this capacity through a unique institution known as the Laws and Ordinances Examination Committee (Horei* Shinsa Iinkai). It is composed of the deputy chiefs of the General Affairs or Coordination sections in each bureau throughout the ministry. All major policies of the ministry are introduced and screened at this level, and no new policy can be initiated without its approval. For a young assistant section chief to be named chairman of this committee is a certain sign that he is on the "elite course" toward becoming a bureau chief and, possibly, the vice-minister.
Above this committee are review groups at the section chief levelthe General Affairs Section Chiefs' Conference (Shomu Kacho* Kaigi)and at the bureau director levelthe Operational Liaison Conference (Jimuren). The bureau director level is the court of last resort for approval of a policy initiated by the assistant section chiefs; anything that must go up to the vice-minister's and minister's level is by definition political. But the most substantive of all these internal coordinating groups is still the first.
112
In addition to these formal groups, there are numerous informal brainstorming institutions in MITI. During the late 1960's one was called the "Komatsu Bar," the conference room and liquor cabinet of Komatsu Yugoro* when he was chief of the General Coordination Section in the Secretariat. Young officials gathered there around 10 o'clock at night for a drink and lively discussionoften about OECD, GATT, and European developments, topics that had interested Komatsu since his service as first secretary in the embassy in Germany. Komatsu, of the class of 1944, became vice-minister in 1974. In addition to the Komatsu Bar, a young MITI bureaucrat could also visit the "Yoshimitsu Bar" (Director Yoshimitsu Hisashi of the Medium and Smaller Enterprises Agency) and the "Takahashi Bar" (Chief Secretary Takahashi Shukuro*).
113
Japanese analysts usually characterize the basic outlook of MITI officials as "nationalistic." Kakuma observes that they like to use expressions such as
joi
* (expulsion of the foreigners) and
iteki
(barbar-
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ians) that date from the last decades of the Tokugawa shogunate. They see their function in life as the protection of Japanese industries from "foreign pressure."
114
When he was chief of the Trade Promotion Bureau from November 1969 to June 1971, Goto* Masafumi liked to use the derogatory term