MITI and the Japanese miracle

Page 289

forget to thank his parents [MITI] for their loving care" (this comment from Sahashi), and that the ministry was in danger of being reduced to the status of the U.S. Department of Commerce (in a word, a mere handmaiden of big business; this according to MITI, which has always claimed to represent the national interest and not the interests of industry).

On the other hand, numerous critics arose to reply that MITI had become "neurotic," that it was acting like industry's "overprotective mama," that it had become nothing more than a bureaucratic

sokaiya

* (a bully or claque hired by some managements to prevent stockholders from asking annoying questions at annual meetings), that it had shown appalling bureaucratic apathy toward the pollution problem, and that it was time for enterprises to stop "weeping in front of MITI's gate."

²⁵

Within the ministry Amaya Naohiro, the head of the Planning Office in the Secretariat (October 1968 to June 1971), published an important treatise answering many of the ministry's critics but also calling for a "new MITI" and a "new approach to industrial policy." Amaya is MITI's best-known "house theorist." In January 1962, while serving as assistant chief of the General Affairs Section in the Secretariat, he became famous for a paper entitled "What Do the Times Require of Us?'' This was a forcefully argued defense of Sahashi's "public-private cooperation formula" and of the ministry's new emphasis on reform of the "industrial structure" as its basic policy line. Because he was then a young official, the "first Amaya thesis" struck some senior officials as a little too strong for their tastessome called him a "cheeky squirt" (

kozo

*)and he was quietly transferred to the Japanese consulate in Sydney until 1966. By 1980 he was vice-minister for international affairs, a new post created in 1976 directly under the MITI vice-minister.

The "second Amaya thesis"formally entitled "Basic Direction of the New International Trade and Industry Policy" (Shin Tsusan* Seisaku no Kihon Hoko* of June 1969)argued that the ministry must respond to changes in the public's values concerning further high-speed growth. In Amaya's view this change had occurred because Japan was beginning the transition from an advanced industrial society to a postindustrial society, and the country therefore required a change of industrial structure every bit as profound and as difficult to achieve as the heavy and chemical industrialization of the 1950's and 1960's.

Some of the characteristics of this new industrial structure would be (1) the growth of the tertiary sector (services) and the systematic