MITI and the Japanese miracle

Page 106

mans. Germany had been a powerful model for modern Japan ever since the Restoration, but in 1930 German precedents were introduced directly into the TIRB because of some unforeseen internal bureaucratic events. Such interaction between the demands of Japanese bureaucratic life and the policies that the Japanese government produced is a constant theme of this study.

During the year 1930 the ruling Minseito * government attempted to politicize MCI, much as the LDP would attempt to do to MITI some thirty years later. The industrial rationalization movement had made MCI an important center of policy, and the party clearly wanted to maneuver bureaucrats friendly to it into positions of leadership. The attempt ultimately failed, but it resulted in Yoshino Shinji's becoming vice-minister in 1931 and in Kishi Nobusuke's being sent to Germany to report back to the TIRB on the industrial rationalization movement there. The actual political incidents of 1930 are of slight importance in themselves, but they had consequences of lasting significance, among them the establishment of the so-called Yoshino-Kishi line in the ministry until 1936. Bureaucrats, like politicians, deal in power, and struggles for power are an inextricable part of bureaucratic life, regardless of what models organization theorists may have favored from Weber to the present.

Two Minseito politicians served their party as MCI minister between 1929 and 1931one a weak politician, Tawara Magoichi in the Hamaguchi cabinet (July 1929 to April 1931), and one a strong politician, Sakurauchi Yukio in the second Wakatsuki cabinet (April to December 1931). (On November 14, 1930, Prime Minister Hamaguchi Osachi was seriously wounded by a right-wing assassin. He remained in office and continued to serve as president of the Minseito until April, when he and his cabinet resigned. He died August 26, 1931, of his wounds. Wakatsuki Reijiro*, prime minister at the time of the financial panic in 1927, returned to power as president of the Minseito after Hamaguchi's resignation.) Dominating both MCI ministers was the powerful Minseito leader and minister of finance in both cabinets, Inoue Junnosuke. During 1930 Inoue became irritated by the growing influence of MCI in general, and of Yoshino Shinji in particular, because the activities of both impinged upon his own ministry's traditional bailiwick. He did not resist MCI directly. He served as a member of the Commerce and Industry Deliberation Council, and he supported industrial rationalization as the reverse side of his own policy of deflation through restoration of the international gold standard. But he wanted some changes made.

On July 2, 1930, a month after the creation of the TIRB, the vice-