MITI and the Japanese miracle

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settled here.

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The public's fears and suspicions were enough to cause the ''rice riots." (The events of 1918 are similar to the panic of 197374 during the first "oil shock," when the economic bureaucracy again had to intervene to stop speculation in kerosene, toilet paper, soap powder, and other products.) Rice prices soared during 1918, and in July fishermen's wives in Toyama rioted over shortages. The panic spread to consumers elsewhere, and riots occurred through September in some five hundred different localities. The Terauchi cabinet was forced to resign in disgrace.

The new Hara cabinet, representing the Seiyukai* party, had to deal promptly with the matter. Hara made Yamamoto Tatsuo minister of agriculture and commerce for the second time, and Yamamoto pushed the Rice Law of 1920 through the Diet. It removed duties on imported rice and initiated a program for developing rice cultivation in the Japanese colonies of Taiwan and Korea. The law also established a system of price controls over rice that has persisted in one form or another to the present day. Yamamoto's policy thus secured food supplies at reasonable prices for Japan's growing industrial labor force, but in combination with the postwar recession of the entire economy that began in the spring of 1920, it also worsened the agricultural depression and tenant unrest that wracked Japan throughout the 1920's.

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These developments were a severe economic and political setback for the Teikoku Nokai*, the landlords' association, and it reacted in anger. What the association had previously requested it now demandeda separate Ministry of Agriculture uncontaminated by commercial and industrial concerns and devoted exclusively to agricultural interests. The Hara government rejected these demands, but in 1923 the earthquake again focused government attention on relief of the cities of Tokyo and Yokohama, and again it seemed to farmers that the efforts undertaken on behalf of the cities were much more forthcoming than anything ever done for them. The following year a series of unusually propitious circumstances allowed the Teikoku Nokai's* petition to succeed.

Hara Kei, the first prime minister of Japan to head the government because he was president of the dominant political party in the lower house of the Diet, had been assassinated on November 4, 1921. His successor as president of the Seiyukai party and as prime minister was Takahashi Korekiyo (18541936), one of the truly outstanding figures of Japan's modern economic and political history and not incidentally the first minister of commerce and industry. Born the illegitimate child of an artist and his 16-year-old maid, Takahashi was