MITI and the Japanese miracle

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dom in principle," and reduced the powers of the government to residual rights of intervention in the economy in the event of balance of payments difficulties or other emergencies.

⁵³

With a global trade surplus during 1977 of some $17.5 billion, which was a 77 percent increase over 1976, Japan could finally afford to lower its guard somewhat.

The new economic conditions of the 1970's also afforded MITI opportunities to exercise many of the old functions that it had perfected over the previous 50 years. For example, during the late 1970's it was busy creating cartels in the "structurally depressed industries" (textiles, rubber, steel, nonferrous metals, shipbuilding, and some petrochemicals) in order to allocate market shares to be scrapped and the number of employees to be retrained or pensioned. Based on the Temporary Measures Law for the Stabilization of Designated Depressed Industries (Tokutei Fukyo* Sangyo* Antei Rinji Sochi Ho*, of May 15, 1978), MITI established a ¥10 billion fund (¥8 billion from the Development Bank and ¥2 billion from industry) for paying firms to scrap excess facilities; and it also obtained an exception to the Antimonopoly Law (opposed by the FTC) for "investment-limiting cartels" and mergers whose purpose was to reduce excess capacity. It all seemed quite familiar.

⁵⁴

On the positive front, during the years after the oil shock the ministry converted most electric power generation from oil to liquefied natural gas, liquefied petroleum gas, or coal. It also increased nuclear power generation by some 58 percent as of 1980; it shifted about half of the nation's 43 blast furnaces from heavy oil to coke and tar (and planned to convert all of them); it cut oil imports by better than 10 percent from 1973 levels; it stockpiled more than a hundred days' supply of petroleum; it diversified sources of supply away from the Middle East (notably to Mexico); and it commissioned the fashion designer, Mori Hanae, to create an "energy conservation look" (

shoene

*

rukku

) for men during summertimea tieless, short-sleeved, safari suitin order to cut air-conditioning costs. During July 1979 MITI Minister Ezaki Masumi had himself photographed wearing one of the new suits and ordered MITI officials to shift to them; the Ministry of Finance, however, turned down the "energy conservation look" for its own officials as too undignified.

Despite the turmoil that swirled around the ministry during the 1970's, by the end of the decade its leaders had reason to be satisfied. Japan had more than fulfilled the long-range goal its bureaucrats had set for the country after the war; it had indeed caught up with Western Europe and North America. The lives of all Japanese had been