MITI and the Japanese miracle

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the occupation. The second source of capital was the funds from the government-operated postal savings system, which were held in trust accounts by the Ministry of Finance. The postal savings system for small savers had existed since the Meiji era, and it had experienced a checkered career of alleged scandals and misuse by the government for various political ventures; for example, the Terauchi government in 1917 and 1918 had used the people's savings to redeem the notorious Nishihara loans to China. During the occupation SCAP had restricted government use of the postal savings accounts primarily to collateral for local bonds, but with the ending of inflation the accounts began to grow quite large as savers turned to the post offices rather than the private banks, which they did not fully trust. Ikeda wanted to open up the use of these funds to support the reindustrialization effort, and he wanted to see the counterpart monies spent for vital projects that the banks could not cover. He thus set out to negotiate these proposals with Dodge.

Ikeda first proposed an export bank, and this idea went down much easier with the Americans than his second onea new version of the RFB. The lack of adequate banking facilities to handle longer-term loans than were commercially available for the export of capital goods was having a retarding effect on trade, and SCAP therefore readily agreed to the creation of the Export Bank of Japan (law number 268 of December 15, 1950). The bank was established on December 28, 1950, and opened for business on February 1, 1951. The initial capital of ¥15 billion came from U.S. aid counterpart funds and from general account budget appropriations. The prime minister appointed the bank's president, and the Ministry of Finance supervised the bank. In April 1952, when the occupation ended, the government renamed it the Export-Import Bank of Japan and gave it the additional task of lending Japanese importers the funds they needed for advance payments for commodity imports approved by MITI. By 1958 the Export-Import Bank's capital account had risen to ¥38.8 billion, and its total loans outstanding amounted to ¥60.3 billion.

During the 1950's the largest proportion of Export-Import Bank loans went for exports, but not all of these truly left the country. A favored category of loans was for what MITI dubbed "plant" (

puranto

) exports, except that the term "plant" in Japanese had come to have a special bureaucratic meaning. Shimamura Takehisa of MITI's Machinery Bureau (MITI 1938 to 1965, and after retirement a senior executive of Furukawa Electric) defined the wordsince there were so few actual exports of complete factories in the early periodto mean any export contract worth more than ¥10 million and with a delay in pay-