MITI and the Japanese miracle

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did not have the material means to wage war successfully against Great Britain and the United States; and the second is that the incident was a rather unimportant purge of mildly Marxist bureaucrats by the Thought Police.

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The most widely held opinion is that Kobayashi was rightthere were reds in the Cabinet Planning Board. This view is based on the list of those arrested and their postwar careers. The list includes Wada Hiroo, a postwar left socialist and the subject of an uproar in 1946 when Yoshida named him agriculture minister; Sata Tadataka, a left socialist and leader of the Economic Stabilization Board under the Katayama government in 1947; Katsumata Seiichi, a Socialist Party Diet member and leading theorist of the left socialist faction; and Masaki Chifuyu, a postwar socialist mayor of Kamakura. Many of these men had entered the Cabinet Research Board (and, from there, the CPB) through backgrounds in agricultural administration or, at least in Inaba's case, as staff members of the old Harmony Society (Kyocho* Kai), an organization set up in 1919 after the rice riots by the Industrial Club to promote cooperation and friendly relations between labor and management.

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As Inaba says, most of them were not communists but "humanists" attracted to vaguely socialist programs. Nonetheless, they were definitely to the left of most reform bureaucrats.

Kobayashi himself became a casualty of the Cabinet Planning Board incident. During early 1941 CPB elements tried to get even with him by attacking his personal fortune and accusing him of income tax evasion. In order to try to end the whole affair, Konoe and Home Minister Hiranuma, who represented a kind of conservatism that was lukewarm about national socialism, arranged for a balanced purge: on April 4, 1941, both MCI Minister Kobayashi and CPB President Hoshino were forced to resign. Given the problems they had encountered, Konoe and Hiranuma decided that they had better look for military officers as replacements. Lieutenant General Suzuki Teiichi became president of the CPB and headed it for the rest of its existence. Looking for a similar type to head MCI, Konoe first chose Admiral Toyoda Teijiro*, a former vice-minister of the navy and son-in-law of a Mitsubishi director. However, Toyoda shortly left, first to become foreign minister and then to be president of Japan Steel (he returned as minister of munitions under the Suzuki cabinet at the end of the war). Konoe therefore selected another admiral, Sakonji Seizo*, a former chief of naval staff and the head of the North Sakhalin Petroleum Company (a Mitsui affiliate), and he headed MCI until the Tojo* government was established.