MITI and the Japanese miracle

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and more realistic "five-year plan for Japanese and Manchurian industry." The army's staff completed this plan in the summer of 1936 and presented it to the Japanese cabinet on May 29, 1937.

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There has been a good deal of controversy about Kishi's role in this plan. After the war the Prosecution Section of the International Military Tribunal for the Far East summoned Shiina some eight times to its offices at Ichigaya to ask him about Kishi's part in formulating the plan. His reply was that the plan was already completed when Kishi arrived and that Kishi had been invited to Hsinking primarily to supervise its implementation. Shiina was certainly the man to ask, since he had been conducting industrial surveys in Manchuria since 1933, and, according to Kishi,

he

was the central figure in drafting the 1936 plan. On another occasion, however, Kishi indicated that he had had a major input into the plan while serving in an advisory capacity in Tokyo.

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Whatever the case, when Kishi arrived, he insisted that Chief of Staff Itagaki Seishiro* of the Kwantung Army give him a free hand to implement the plan. Itagaki agreed, and army participation in Manchurian industrial affairs declined significantly.

The plan was extremely ambitious. It set targets of 5 million tons of pig iron, 3.5 million tons of steel ingots, 2 million tons of finished steel products, 38 million tons of coal, 2.6 million kilowatts of electric power, 400,000 tons of wood pulp, and so forth.

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In order to carry out this plan, Kishi invited the leader of the Nissan zaibatsu, Ayukawa Gisuke, to come to Manchuria to manage it. Ayukawa was acceptable to the army because he represented a "new zaibatsu"one of the concerns that had thrived as a result of the military expansion of the 1930's and that was made up of firms concentrated in comparatively high-technology industriesand because Ayukawa had many personal ties to Kishi and Yoshino (Yoshino, in fact, eventually joined Ayukawa's Manchurian firm after he was dropped as minister of commerce and industry in 1938). Also, Ayukawa's Nissan automobile firm was one of the two companies specially favored in the Automobile Manufacturing Industry Law of 1936 (discussed below). It was as a result of these plans and considerations that during the autumn of 1937 the Japan Industrial Corporation (Nissan) changed its name and incorporated in Manchukuo as the Manchurian Heavy Industries Corporation (Manshu* Jukogyo* K.K., abbreviated Mangyo*) with Ayukawa Gisuke as president.

Ayukawa planned to raise some $250 million from United States sources. He believed that this, plus his own capital, would be enough to get started. As it turned out, the war with China erupted just as he arrived on the scene, and international financing never became avail-