MITI and the Japanese miracle Read online

  jimu jikan

  , which I have rendered simply as "vice-minister"). The Japanese prime minister thus has the power to name only about 20 ministers, plus 4 party officials, whereas the American president, for example, appoints at least 1,000 people to posts in the bureaucracy (one Japanese analyst counted 916 bureaucratic appointments made by President Carter during early 1977).

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  The prime minister is also guided by the political need to balance factions within the LDP and only rarely by the qualifications of a politician for a particular ministerial post.

  *

  The Japanese bureaucracy jealously guards the practice of making no political appointments below the ministerial level; the bureaucrats believe that this helps establish their claim to be above politics and to speak only for the national interest. One of the bureaucracy's greatest fears is "political interference" in its internal affairs or, worse, a ministry's being made subservient to a party or a politician. Even though the minister is legally in command of and responsible for everything that happens in a ministry, a delicate relationship between him and the vice-minister inevitably exists from the outset. The norm is for the minister to fear his bureaucrats and to be dominated by them; one journalist suggests that the only time a minister ever enjoys his post is on the day he is photographed in formal dress at the Imperial Palace as part of the cabinet's investiture ceremony.

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  If this norm prevails, the bureaucrats are satisfied. But what they really want is a minister who will leave them alone while at the same time taking responsibility for the ministry and protecting it from intrusion by other politicians or

  *

  The secretary-general of the LDPone of the 4 party leaders under the party president (who is simultaneously the prime minister)appoints an additional 24 parliamentary vice-ministers, 2 (1 for each house) in the ministries of Finance, Agriculture and Forestry, and International Trade and Industry, and 1 in each of the other ministries. These vice-ministers are supposed to provide liaison between the ministries and the Diet, but "the posts' chief attraction is that they furnish the politicians a chance to use the ministry's facilities to do favors for their constituents (thus bettering themselves in the elections), and for other politicians (thus bettering themselves in the party)." See Nathaniel B. Thayer,

  How the Conservatives Rule Japan

  (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1969), p. 279. The

  Mainichi

  observes that, like an appendix in a human body, the parliamentary vice-ministers do not seem to perform a vital function. They are invariably appointed with an eye to rewarding factions within the party and not to the effective functioning of either the bureaucracy or the Diet. See

  Japan Times

  , May 7, 1974, and December 27, 1975.

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  outside interests, particularly business interests. And this requires that a minister be a powerful politicianwho may have ideas of his own. If he is also a former bureaucrat, perhaps even one from the ministry to which he has been appointed, the relationship can get quite complex.

  Ministry of Finance officials claim to fear powerful ministers from their own service, men such as Kaya Okinori, Ikeda Hayato, or Fukuda Takeo.

  52

  Ikeda, in particular, was always an activist minister in whatever ministry he headed; and he became famous for shaking up the Ministry of Finance in order to remove fiscal conservatives who were blocking his plans for rapid economic growth, and also in order to enlist the ministry in support of his own political ambitions.

  53

  The trade and industry bureaucrats generally liked Ikeda when he was MITI minister, largely because they agreed with him, but when they disagreedas for example over the pace of trade liberalization in 1960he won. He also once gave orders that MITI men could not talk to the press without his approval because he was tired of reading in the newspapers about new economic initiatives that he knew nothing about.

  54

  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.

  Before the war the Ministry of Commerce and Industry included in its ranks such high-status figures as Baron Ito * Bunkichi, who was the illegitimate son of the Meiji oligarch Ito Hirobumi and who became the patron of Yoshino Shinji, one of the two or three most important figures in the history of MITI. Kido Koichi*, of noble ancestry, was in the Ministry of Commerce and Industry before the war and became the wartime Lord Keeper of the Privy Seal. Shiina Etsusaburo* was the nephew of Goto* Shimpei, the chief administrator of Taiwan in the Meiji era, president of the South Manchurian Railroad, and the rebuilder of Tokyo after the earthquake of 1923.

  These connections and possible influences are important in Japan, and they are not necessarily accidental. A great many young bureaucrats ask their section chiefs to arrange their marriages, and a section chief will often have keibatsu considerations in mind when he promotes a match. Nonetheless, most informed observers conclude that keibatsu is not as important in the postwar bureaucracy as it was before the war.

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  Still, some MITI officials report that it is better for one's career to have a good keibatsu than a poor one, and Kubota notes that "on the average the 19491959 higher civil servants [the group that he studied in depth] more often had prominent fathers-in-law than prominent fathers."

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  It appears that bureaucrats in Japan are good catches as husbands.

  Kyodobatsu* are similarly present among bureaucrats but of comparatively slight influence. A former MITI vice-minister, Tokunaga Hisatsugu (executive director of New Japan Steel after retirement), notes that when he was vice-minister, the minister was Ishii Mitsujiro*, one of the major figures of postwar conservative politics. Ishii was not only his "senior" (

  sempai

  ), but they both came from the same area of Fukuoka prefecturethat is, they both belong to what is called the same

  kyoto

  * (literally, "village party"). According to Tokunaga, this factor somewhat inhibited him in his relations with Ishii.

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  Kishi Nobusuke, Matsuoka Yosuke*, and Ayukawa Gisuke all were natives of Yamaguchi prefecture, and each has said that this contributed to their collaboration in the industrial development of Manchuria during the 1930's (Kishi is also the true elder brother of Sato* Eisaku, although Kishi was adopted into a different lineage). The career of Kogane Yoshiteru, a major figure in the prewar Ministry of Commerce

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  and Industry and an ex-MITI bureaucrat turned politician in the Diet during the 1950's and 1960's, illustrates both keibatsu and kyodobatsu *. He was born in 1898 into a commoner family in Odawara, Kanagawa prefecture, but as a young official he married the daughter of the sister of Mori Kaku's wife and thereby acquired the prewar secretary-general of the Seiyukai* party as his uncle. Through this connection and his background as a native of Kanagawa, he later succeeded to Mori's secure constituency in the Kanagawa third electoral district, which he represented in the Diet for about twenty years.

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  Keibatsu and kyodobatsu are part of any large Japanese organization, but gakubatsu is without question the single most important influence within the Japanese state bureaucracy. The cliques of university classmates are inseparable from bureaucratic life, because it is their university degrees and their success in passing the Higher-level Public Officials Examination that set bureaucrats apart from other elites in the society. Gakubatsu also forms the most pervasive "old boy" network throughout the society as a whole.

  On March 1, 1886, the government issued an Imperial Ordinance stating that "the Imperial University has the objectives of giving instruction in the arts and sciences and inquiring into abstruse principles required by the state." This order established Tokyo Imperial Universityor Todai*, as it is known in abbreviationas an institution to train an administrative service that would replace the samurai of Choshu* and Satsuma within the government. Todai graduates were always preferred by the government, but in the twentieth century, with the establishment of other modern universities, the government adopted the practice of examining all prospective state officials, including Tokyo University graduates. These higher civil service entrance examinations were extremely difficult; Spaulding calculates that the failure rate on the main exam during the period 192843 was 90 percent.

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  The entrance examination system continued after the war with little change. During 1977 about 53,000 people took the Higher-level Public Officials Examination, and only about 1,300 passed, a ratio of 1 passer to 41 applicants. Because of its original orientation toward education for government service, as well as its general excellence, Tokyo University has always provided the greatest number of applicants who pass the examinations (see Table 3).

  Not all officials in a ministry must be certified through the civil service examinations, however. Before the w
ar those who passed the examinations received Imperial appointments; those who did not take the examinations received ordinary (

  hannin

  ) appointments. The distinction is roughly equivalent to that between commissioned and

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  TABLE

  3

  Numbers and Universities of Passers of the Higher-Level Public Officials Examinations, 1975 and 1976

  Number passing examination

  University

  1975

  1976

  Tokyo University

  459

  461

  Kyoto University

  172

  193

  Tohoku * University

  67

  51

  Nagoya University

  34

  42

  Kyushu* University

  29

  41

  Tokyo Industrial University

  44

  38

  Waseda University

  28

  32

  Osaka University

  44

  32

  Hokkaido* University

  45

  31