MITI and the Japanese miracle

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early days, and law graduates felt at a disadvantage in competing with them in the agricultural career path. They therefore clustered in commercial and industrial administration.

There was not much work for them to do there, however. Before World War I commercial affairs and industrial affairs were always subordinate to the Agricultural Affairs Bureau, and they were regularly combined into one Commercial and Industrial Bureau (Shoko * Kyoku) as an economy measure. They were finally separated into two bureaus only in May 1919. The chief commercial function of MAC was supervising the insurance companies, the stock and commodity exchanges, and the warehousing businessall sectors of the economy that the commercial wing of the ministry would lose to other agencies by the time of the Pacific War. Industrial administration was almost nonexistent. Since the Matsukata reforms, and particularly after the creation of the Diet and the end of the 189495 war with China, the government's overall policy toward industry and foreign trade had become a more or less orthodox version of laissez faire. Even when MAC tried to take some initiative in the industrial arena, its ties with industrial leaders were weak, except for the personal relations between the oligarchs and the zaibatsu, and industrialists commonly ignored what government bureaucrats had to say.

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In any case the biggest industries were the cotton textile firms of Osaka, and they were fiercely independent and suspicious of Tokyo.

When Yamamoto Tatsuo of the Mitsubishi zaibatsu became minister of MAC in 1913, he undertook to strengthen the commercial and industrial side of the administration. With a few notable exceptions, most of its officials still represented the lingering influence of Satsuma and Choshu* retainers in the state bureaucracy. The first vice-ministers from among government service examinees did not reach the top in any ministry until 1912. In retrospect Yamamoto's most important accomplishment was the recruiting of Yoshino Shinji. Yamamoto personally went to Todai* and explained to the law faculty that he wanted some bright young law graduates for the Ministry of Agriculture and Commerce. As a result, the school's advisers steered Yoshino to MAC rather than to the more prestigious Home Affairs or Finance ministries, which he had expected to join. Yoshino recalled that when he entered the ministry in 1913 there were only three or four officials in commercial administration who had law degrees.

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Yamamoto was proud of Yoshino and took good care of him. Ten months after Yoshino had joined the ministry, Yamamoto delegated him as the resident Japanese representative to the San Francisco International Exposition of 1915. It was a superb opportunity for a young