MITI and the Japanese miracle

Page 105

gyo Gorika * Kyoku. He explained that the "

ka

" worried him, since

kakyoku

means "old song," and he was afraid his critics and the opposition might turn this into a pun.

³⁸

There certainly were critics. On the day before the bureau was scheduled to open, a workman scribbled the character "

fu

" in front of

gori

* on its new office signboard, thus transforming it into the "Industrial Irrationality Bureau."

³⁹

Leftists and antizaibatsu elements were skeptical about the rationalization movement. They sometimes referred to it as "Japanese-style rationalization," meaning wage cuts, reductions in the number of employees, and a stretching out of working hours.

⁴⁰

There was also some international criticism to the effect that rationalization was a cover for "social dumping," a term of abuse that was especially applied to Japan at the time. During the early 1930's the International Labor Organization distinguished between what it called "commercial dumping"an unfair business practiceand "social dumping"a form of alleged exploitation of workers. Commercial dumping meant "an operation that consists in exporting goods at less than cost of production plus a fair profit, and at the same time, selling the same goods on the home market at a higher price than the cost of production plus a fair profit,'' whereas social dumping meant "the operation of providing the export of national products by decreasing their cost of production as the result of depressing conditions of labor in the undertakings which produce them or keeping those conditions at a low level if they are already at such a level."

⁴¹

The Japanese always resented the charge of social dumping, believing they were in fact trying to take the measures necessary to eliminate it.

The idea of industrial rationalization circulated widely in many countries during the 1920's and 1930's. Japan's specific conception of it originated as a poorly digested amalgam of then current American enthusiasms ("efficiency experts" and "time-and-motion studies"), concrete Japanese problems (particularly the fierce competition that existed among the large number of native firms and the consequent dumping of their products), and the influence of Soviet precedents such as the First Five Year Plan (192833) and the writings of the Hungarian economist and Soviet adviser Eugene Varga. With regard to Soviet influence, it should be remembered that during the 1920's socialist ideas had an impact on nonsocialist and even antisocialist groups and nations, particularly in the non-English-speaking industrialized countries. Later I shall draw attention to the specific link between Soviet and Japanese planning of the 1930's and 1940's in terms of its conceptual foundations. However, in 1930 by far the greatest influence on the Japanese theory of rationalization came from the Ger-