MITI and the Japanese miracle

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fore sue for peace. Tojo * was enraged. The word "defeat" was all but taboo in the Japan of 1944, and Tojo accused Kishi of meddling with the military's prerogative of supreme command. This was an extremely dangerous charge for Kishi. Tojo exercised effective control over the military police (

kempeitai

)he was a former Kempei commander in the Kwantung Armyand he had caused several political figures to meet their deaths at the hands of the military police for disagreeing with him (for example, Nakano Seigo*, 18861943, a member of the Diet since 1920).

Kishi nonetheless stood his ground. The inner reality was that powerful figures in the Diet and the Imperial Household agreed with Kishi and wanted to be rid of Tojo. Some of these men were Kido Koichi* (in the palace); Funada Naka (in the Diet); Ino Hiroya (an old MAC associate of Kishi's and one whom Kishi wished had gone to MCI instead of Agriculture in 1925; he served from 1941 to 1943 in the Tojo cabinet as agriculture minister); and Fujiyama Aiichiro* (a prominent businessman and adviser to the navy who plotted with the admirals against Tojo after the Saipan disaster). It appears that Tojo did not dare move against Kishi because he feared Kishi's numerous but unseen supporters. Incidentally, after Kishi became prime minister in 1957, he named Fujiyama minister of foreign affairs in his first cabinet and Ino minister of justice in his second.

The cabinet of General Koiso, who succeeded Tojo, was transitional. The "watchdog" Fujihara moved up to become minister of munitions, and he appointed Kishi's old bureaucratic competitor, Takeuchi Kakichi (one of Murase Naokai's associates), as vice-minister. Fujihara only lasted six months. He resigned at the end of 1944 because of "ill health" (he was 75 years old but lived on until 1960); the real reason, however, was that a Mitsubishi-Sumitomo coalition forced him out because they were worried that a Mitsui-affiliated minister might threaten their own interests. As a replacement the prime minister chose a neutral figurethe old Home Ministry bureaucrat and first director of the Cabinet Research Bureau back in 1935, Yoshida Shigeru.

^*

In the spring of 1945 the fall of Iwo Jima, the invasion of Okinawa, and the great March 10 air raid on Tokyo precipitated the resignation of the Koiso cabinet. The new government of Admiral Suzuki was charged to bring the war to an end, which it did. For his munitions minister, Suzuki chose a fellow admiral, the ubiquitous Toyoda Teijiro*, who was then working as head of the Iron and Steel Control

^*

Again it should be remembered that this is not the Yoshida Shigeru who became prime minister after the war.