MITI and the Japanese miracle

Page 244

Sahashi spent virtually all of his career in the various industrial bureaustextiles, coal, and heavy industrieswhere he was also to spend the four critical years 1957 to 1961. As we saw in the last chapter, in 1951 he clashed with Chief Secretary Nagayama and was exiled to Sendai. Upon his return to the home office, he worked as chief of the Coal Policy Section just as the initial rationalization policies were being undertaken to try to save some of Japan's domestic energy production in the face of imported (and at the time highly price-competitive) petroleum. Because of his successful work in coal, the great senior of coal administration and then vice-minister, Hirai Tomisaburo *, named Sahashi chief of the sensitive Secretarial Section (Hisho-ka), which was the office in charge of all hiring and personnel assignments for the ministry and also the MITI equivalent of MCI's Documents Section (Bunsho-ka), which Yoshino and Kishi had used so effectively to establish the Yoshino-Kishi line.

Sahashi served longer in charge of personnel than any other postwar official. During his three years in the Secretariat he undertook many important initiatives: he was the first to employ women as career officers in the ministry, he shifted people about on the basis of their capabilities rather than strict seniority (which bothered some of his colleagues), and he eliminated the last vestiges of Nagayama's influence. Most important, he devoted himself to perpetuating the so-called Kishi-Shiina approach (heavy industrialization) to policy-making within the ministry. Through careful and timely transfers of both his seniors and his juniors, he set up the line of descent for the vice-ministership from Ishihara Takeo to Ueno Koshichi* to Tokunaga Hisatsugu to Matsuo Kinzo*and, so he hoped, to Sahashi Shigeru. The key to this strategy was making the post of chief of the Enterprises Bureau the last stop before the vice-ministership, which ap-

(footnote continued from previous page)

of the same name,

Shosetsu

*

Tsusan-sho

* (1975). Akimoto's novel first appeared serially in the popular weekly magazine

Shukan

*

bunshun

. Both Akaboshi and Akimoto use the real names of people in their books, and Akaboshi's is not really a novel (the word "novel" appears to have been added to try to inhibit attacks on it). All three cover the same groundthe reaction to liberalization, the Sahashi-Imai fight for the vice-ministership, Sahashi's clash with Sumitomo Metals, the involvement of politicians in the personnel affairs of the bureaucracy, and so forthand Akaboshi's differs only in having come first. For a concordance to the names in Shiroyama, see

Kankai

, November 1975, pp. 13031; to cite a few examples, Kazagoshi in the novel is Sahashi, Sudo* Keisaku is Prime Minister Sato* Eisaku, and Minister Kuki ("nine devils") is Miki Takeo, MITI minister from June 1965 to December 1966. Sahashi expressed his dislike of Akaboshi's book to me in an interview in Tokyo, September 5, 1974; and Ojimi* Yoshihisa, vice-minister in 1971, has written that he was appalled that the novel should have been published while he was in office (

Tsusan

*

jyanaru

*, May 24, 1975, p. 44). For Sahashi's elliptical praise of Shiroyama's book, see

ibid.

, p. 38.