MITI and the Japanese miracle

Page 257

group of MITI officers. Shortly after taking over as bureau chief, he sent a personal letter to Morozumi Yoshihiko, who was then working in the Japanese Embassy in Paris (June 1956 to August 1961), telling him that liberalization was inevitable, that a new industrial policy to deal with it was mandatory, and asking him to join the Enterprises Bureau. Morozumi represented a new breed of officer in the ministry, men who combined overseas service, primarily in continental Europe rather than in the Anglo-American countries, with industrial policy expertise. Many of them, including Morozumi, became vice-ministers during the 1970's. They were the authorities within the ministry on the Common Market, on the so-called invasion of Europe by American capital, and on such ideas for industrial development as the French concept of

économie concertée

, or what the Japanese call the "mixed economy" (

kongo

*

keizai

).

^*

In addition to Morozumi, MITI men with this sort of experience included Hayashi Shintaro* (director of the JETRO office in Hamburg, 196165), Komatsu Yugoro* (Japanese Embassy, Bonn, 196065), and Masuda Minoru (Japanese Embassy, Brussels, 196266).

²²

Before Sahashi's downfall, these officers were strong supporters of his proposed law, but during the late 1960's they shifted to the so-called international faction.

Morozumi was a major author of the Special Measures Law, contributing to it his experience gained in General de Gaulle's Paris, his fear of "American capital," and his knowledge of French precedents for what Sahashi wanted to do in Japan. On August 25, 1961, Sahashi named him chief of the First Enterprises Section in the Enterprises Bureau. Other participants in the drafting of the law were Takashima, the bureau's deputy director; Miyake Yukio, chief of the Industrial Fi-

^*

According to Stephen S. Cohen, "The

économie concertée

is a partnership of big business, the state and, in theory though not in practice, the trade unions. The managers of big business and the managers of the state run the modern core of a nation's economymostly the oligopoly sectors. Positive cooperationnot conflict, as in a market ideologyis its motor. The state is not a silent partner; it is an initiating, active partner. It intervenes in every aspect of economic affairs, encouraging, teaching, sometimes even threatening. Its purpose is to promote economic modernization: greater efficiency, greater productivity, greater expansion. The partnership works for the general interest; and it works outside the traditional political arena. Parliament and the constellation of institutions that surrounds parliament are not necessary for the smooth functioning of the system. . . . The

économie concertée

is the new higher civil servants' favorite model of economic and social organization. It is fundamentally an attitude of cooperation between the stewards of the state and the managers of big business."

Modern Capitalist Planning: The French Model

(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1969), pp. 5152. Former MITI Vice-Minister Ojimi* Yoshihisa states bluntly that "the Special Measures Law was actually an attempt to introduce the French

économie concertée

into Japan." Ojimi Yoshihisa and Uchida Tadao, "Nihon no kanryo* gyosei* to kanmin kyocho* taisei" (Japan's bureaucratic administration and the public-private cooperative system),

Gendai keizai

, September 1972, p. 30.