MITI and the Japanese miracle

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convinced that industrial cartels were using the crisis in order to make huge profits. An atmosphere similar to that at the time of the rice riots gripped the country. Minister Nakasone set up a command post inside MITI that he manned himself with his bureau chiefs and his chiefs of the Paper and Pulp Industry Section in the Consumer Goods Industries Bureau (in charge of toilet paper) and the Chemical Products Section in the Basic Industries Bureau (in charge of detergent). When the taxi drivers went on strike because of a shortage of liquefied petroleum gas, or housewives rioted in Osaka because of a shortage of kerosene, or long lines were discovered in front of supermarkets that allegedly had toilet paper for sale, the MITI leaders tried to send emergency shipments to calm the panic buying. Old industrial policy bureaucrats reared on the slogan that "steel is the rice of industry" now found themselves preoccupied with consumer goods and irate housewives. The leaders of the ministry, who had begun their careers during the occupation, said that it reminded them of the days of the Economic Stabilization Board, when MCI exercised control over all commodities.

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Out of this confusion came two new laws: the Emergency Measures Law for the Stabilization of the People's Livelihood (Kokumin Seikatsu Antei Kinkyu* Sochi Ho*, number 121 of December 22, 1973) and the Petroleum Supply and Demand Normalization Law (Sekiyu Jukyu* Tekiseika Ho, number 122, also of December 22). They gave MITI broad powers to demand reports from wholesalers and retailers on their supplies, to establish standard prices for designated commodities, to draw up plans for the supply of consumer products, and to fine violators. Nakamura compares the petroleum law specifically with Yoshino's trade control law of September 1937, and Kakuma sees in both 1973 laws a return to at least the time of Sahashi's Special Measures Law.

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In essence the new laws legalized MITI's administrative guidance and formally recognized that administrative guidance was in the national interest. Neither law created a "third control era," as some feared they would, but they did begin to tip the balance in Japan from "self-control" back toward "state control."

And yet during 1973, with the country experiencing a 29 percent inflation rate, the question of whether MITI's administrative guidance served the national interest or only the interests of big business remained intensely controversial. It was the Fair Trade Commission that placed this question squarely in the limelight. On October 24, 1972, Prime Minister Tanaka had named a most unusual and independent former bureaucrat, Takahashi Toshihide (chief of the Ministry of Finance's Banking Bureau from April 1963 to June 1965, the period dur-