MITI and the Japanese miracle

Page 173

divorce administration from some of the most obvious features of aggressive imperialism."

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Since SCAP had decided on an indirect occupation, which left the Japanese government intact even if taking orders from SCAP, the Allies did not demand a reform of all ministries, only those that had been closely connected with the military or the police (one was the Home Ministry), which the occupation ordered abolished. SCAP intended to deal on an individual basis with those bureaucrats whom it held responsible for the warthrough the purge rather than through structural change. But as we saw in Chapter 2, recent Japanese estimates put the number of MCI officials who were actually purged at only 42; and according to SCAP's own figures, it investigated 69 MCI officials but removed from office only 10.

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Thus Shiina's last-minute ploy worked quite well; the trade and industry bureaucracy maintained its continuity despite the crisis of defeat.

The accounts of what happened during the four years from mid-1945 to mid-1949 in the realm of economic and industrial policywhether by SCAP officials or Japaneseoften differ so markedly as to make it appear that each side is talking about a different country. SCAP began the occupation by declaring that the Japanese had brought about their own economic difficulties and that the Allies therefore took no responsibility for maintaining any particular level of living in Japan. However, the Americans quickly discovered that if they stuck to this positiongiven the collapse of all Japanese international tradethey would merely ensure a communist revolution in Japan and not a "democratically reoriented" country.

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The Americans therefore began state-controlled trade and demanded that the Japanese government impose economic controls. As it turned out, the prewar and wartime victories of the zaibatsu over the state-control bureaucrats proved to be the zaibatsu's undoing. SCAP declared that the zaibatsu had been responsible for the war economy, banned any further private cartels, and ordered government officials to exercise the powers previously reserved for the control associations. MCI officials of the "Kishi-Shiina line" were only too happy to oblige; after their struggles of the previous fifteen years, it suddenly seemed as if they had arrived in the bureaucratic promised land.

Similarly, with regard to emergency economic rehabilitation measures or positive economic reforms, the Japanese and the Americans often seemed purposely to misunderstand each other. Yoshida Shigeru (18781967), the great ex-bureaucrat prime minister who presided over Japan's rise from the ashes, once commented, "The occupation, with all the power and authority behind its operation, was