MITI and the Japanese miracle

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great debate at a MITI ministerial conference called to discuss liberalization. According to the report of Komatsu Yugoro *, Matsuo Taiichiro*, then director of the International Trade Bureau, was alone in speaking in favor of the policy. Imai did not have to speak; he was already identified with liberalizationa hero to some and a near traitor to others.

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He had, however, clearly won the trust and confidence of the MITI minister, who was soon to become prime minister.

Imai himself has noted that liberalization was as much a political and administrative problem as an economic one. He favored it because of his personal dislike for the controlled economy, a dislike that grew out of the occupation. But he also saw liberalization as an opportunity to move Japan toward an industrial structure with fewer enterprises overall, but with more, proportionately, in high-technology industries, and in this his position and Sahashi's coincided. Within the ministry as a whole, however, young officials thought that liberalization would mean the end of their jobs, senior officials in the vertical bureaus were worried about the structural weaknesses of their industries, and politicians feared for their reelection. Ikeda persisted nonetheless. In June the outgoing Kishi cabinet adopted Ikeda's trade liberalization plan, which set the goal of an economy that would be 80 percent liberalized within three years.

The figure of 80 percent was to be calculated according to the commodities and products listed on the Brussels Customs Schedule. On this basis, the rate of import liberalization, which in April 1956 stood at 22 percent, had been raised by April 1960 to 41 percent. The plan's 80 percent liberalization was to be attained by fiscal 1963, the initial target for 1961 being set at 62 percent. The mere publication of these figures set off a complicated process of jockeying by each industry (and its MITI bureau) to have the lifting of its controls scheduled late rather than early. Shiroyama suggests in his novel that Ikeda actually began with cotton and wool because these industries were heavy contributors to his political rivals, although Imai never mentions this as a consideration.

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It is hard to recapture today the crisis atmosphere that existed in Japanese industrial circles during 1961. The press prattled on endlessly about "the second coming of the black ships," "the defenselessness of the Japanese islands in the face of attack from huge foreign capitalist powers," and "the readying of the Japanese economy for a bloodstained battle between national capital and foreign capital."

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Sahashi himself invoked the name of the National General Mobilization Law of 1938 and said that Japan again required a "national general mobilization'' in order to create an economic system that could with-