MITI and the Japanese miracle

Page 239

demystification of the Japanese high-growth system. That system, it seems to me, resulted from three things: a popular consensus favoring economic priorities, one that was dictated by the harsh conditions of the 1940's and by Japan's situational imperatives; an organizational inheritance from the first 25 years of the Showa * era; and conscious institutional manipulation starting from the Dodge Line and Korean War periods. All of these political and institutional alignments were aimed at national mobilization to achieve high-speed economic growth, and that is precisely what they brought about.

Japan's priorities are not hard to fathom. As was discussed in the previous chapter, the Pacific War had already imposed on the Japanese some of the harshest conditions endured by the civilian population of any belligerent nation, and the postwar inflation merely exacerbated these conditions. In addition to providing ample incentive to economic mobilization, the misery of the 1940's also provided one other structural support; it made all Japanese equally poor. The high-speed growth of the 1950's was therefore not socially divisive in the sense of benefiting one group or class at the expense of another. Those who gained from the egalitarianism of the 1950's were the Japanese born in the 1960's: the part of the profits of high-speed growth that was distributed was portioned out more or less equitably, and a large proportion was not distributed at all but reinvested. Strongly bolstering the priorities of the Japanese themselves, the United States encouraged Japan to regain its economic strength and did everything an ally could do to help.

The organizational heritage of the Showa era is somewhat more complicated. I am thinking of such social supports for public-private cooperation as the experience of failure of both self-imposed and state control, the convergence of views about the nature of economic management among bureaucrats and entrepreneurs as a result of common or very similar educational experiences (for instance, at Todai* law school), and an extensive cross-penetration of elites as a result of the recruitment of politicians and managers from among the ranks of former government officials. These features of Japanese society are not purely cultural givens, although they would be hard to duplicate in other societies since they reflect what Japan was able to salvage from the rubble of the early Showa era. A nation that wished to adopt them might have to reexperience Japan's modern history. The famous Japanese "consensus" appeared only during the 1950's; it did not yet exist during the 1930's and 1940's, which suggests that it was based on changes in historical circumstances and political consciousness and not on unique social values.