MITI and the Japanese miracle

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tunately for MCI, this turned out to be one of the most abortive maneuvers its leaders ever undertook. Shirasu turned Nagayama around and made him one of his own lieutenants. Nagayama then returned to MITI, where he was dubbed "Emperor Nagayama," to become the first head of the MITI Secretariat (194953) and the official in charge of personnel appointments (the case of "Emperor Nagayama" is discussed further in Chapter 6).

Another thing the MCI officials did was to write the MITI Establishment Law (number 102, introduced in the Diet on April 22, 1949, passed on May 24, and implemented on May 25). In this law MCI tried to accommodate itself to the new order by putting the prefix "international trade" (

tsusho

*) in front of the name of each of its policy-making and industrial bureaus, the result being a series of odd-sounding titles like International Trade Enterprises Bureau (Tsusho* Kigyo* Kyoku), and so forth. They also grouped all of the bureaus in charge of energy problems into one separate external bureau, the Resources Agency (Shigen Cho*), to downplay their importance. The Resources Agency was abolished in 1952 in the sweeping restructuring of MITI that followed the end of the occupation, but it was reestablished in 1973, when energy policy once again became salient, as the Natural Resources and Energy Agency (Shigen Enerugi* Cho). All of these internal MITI arrangements were intended to reorient it away from MCI's emphasis on internal control and priority production and toward international trade and the promotion of exports; they also had the secondary purpose of trying to smuggle as much of the old MCI as possible past Shirasu's and Yoshida's scrutiny. (MITI's initial internal organization is detailed in Appendix B).

During early 1949 rumors circulated that Shirasu himself intended to become MITI's first vice-minister. This was the moment of truth for the old MCI. Its last vice-minister, Matsuda Taro*, undertook to negotiate personally with Shirasu to try to prevent this from happening. He succeeded through a compromise in which it was agreed that Matsuda would resign, that Nagayama would take over the Secretariat even though there were men senior to him in the ministry, and that the directors of the new International Trade Bureau (ITB; the old BOT reborn within MITI) would come from the Foreign Ministryin return for all of which MCI could name one of its own people as vice-minister (Matsuda named Yamamoto Takayuki, a "Kishi-Shiina line" official). As it turned out, the first four ITB directors were, in fact, very distinguished diplomatsnamely, Takeuchi Ryuji*, later ambassador to West Germany, who served from May to December, 1949;