MITI and the Japanese miracle

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shino and Kishi, but particularly Kishi because of his involvement in the protests against pay cuts a few years earlier.

²⁰

Ogawa offered Yoshino the presidency of the newly established Tohoku* (Northeast) Industrial Development Company, a Japanese version of the Tennessee Valley Authority for the development of a backward region. And Ogawa said to Kishi that the Kwantung Army had strongly requested Kishi's services in the Manchurian government (which was true). Yoshino contemplated refusing to resign on grounds that as an Imperial official he could not be dismissed, but he thought better of it. He realized that he had remained as vice-minister too long and was aware that junior officials in the ministry were holding meetings about the political situation from which he was excluded.

²¹

On Yoshino's birthday, September 17, 1936, he and Kishi jointly submitted their letters of resignation. Yoshino went to Tohoku, where he had been born, and Kishi became the deputy director of the Industrial Department of the government of Manchukuo.

In strict accordance with custom Ogawa asked Yoshino to name his successor. Yoshino recommended Takeuchi Kakichi, class of 1915, and at the time director of the Patent Bureau. Takeuchi had never been popular with Kishi, who apparently believed that Takeuchi should have been sent to the Agriculture Ministry when MAC was divided in 1925. Nonetheless, Takeuchi served in many important, typically reform bureaucratic posts in MCI and elsewhere in the government: he was a department chief in the TIRB from 1930 to 1935, president of the Cabinet Planning Board from January to July 1940, and vice-minister of munitions from July 1944 to April 1945. In 1936 Ogawa appointed him vice-minister of commerce and industry but made clear that he distrusted him as a follower of the Yoshino-Kishi line. Under these circumstances Takeuchi resigned two months later, and after a short interval in Manchuria took up the post of director of the semidetached Fuel Bureau, where he felt much more comfortable. As his successor Ogawa selected Murase Naokai, an official much more to Ogawa's liking and the vice-minister who led MCI through the first years of the China war and through its total reorganization in 1939.

Murase Naokai (18901968) entered MAC from Todai* Law in 1914. He had not had much experience in MAC or MCI, since from 1919 to 1933 he had worked as a transferee in the Cabinet Legislation Bureau (Hosei* Kyoku). This bureau was the most prestigious post for a prewar bureaucrat, and its directorship was the pinnacle of the Imperial service. By 1933 Murase had become a councillor in the bureau, and