MITI and the Japanese miracle

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reaucratic competition and coordination common to all state systems occur prominently in Japan, including leaks to and bureaucratic manipulation of the press, selective briefing of favored politicians, the maintenance of secrecy concerning the actual norms of bureaucratic life, and so forth.

The other kind of conflictthat between the bureaucracy and political authoritiesis equally common. The effective functioning of the developmental system requires a separation between reigning and ruling, but the separation itself is never formally acknowledged (it is ura, not omote; implicit, not explicit). As a result, boundary problems are inevitable, and serious conflict occurs when the political leaders believe the bureaucracy is exceeding its powers (as during the 1930's) or when the bureaucracy believes the politicians are exceeding theirs (as during the "Fukuda typhoon" or under the regime of Prime Minister Tanaka Kakuei). MITI's history reveals numerous examples of this type of conflict: the fight between MCI Minister Ogawa and Yoshino and Kishi; the fight between zaibatsu-connected ministers and the reform bureaucrats; the fight between MCI Minister Kobayashi and Kishi and the "reds" of the Cabinet Planning Board; the fight between Tojo * and Kishi during 1944 (although perhaps this is a better example of intrabureaucratic conflict); the fight between Yoshida and Shirasu on the one hand and the leaders of MCI on the other at the time of the creation of MITI; and the involvement of politicians in the Imai-Sahashi dispute.

Most of the practices used to mitigate struggles among bureaucrats are also suitable for mitigating struggles between bureaucrats and politicians. The norm is the attempt to avoid or to privatize conflict. This is often achieved by combining the perspectives of each side in one leader. Japan's most important postwar politiciansYoshida, Kishi, Ikeda, Sato*, Fukuda Takeo, and Ohira*were all former senior bureaucrats. Although it is natural that political leaders would be found among such an intrinsic elite as the Japanese higher bureaucracy, their utilization in postwar Japan has certainly contributed to the effective operation and coordination of the Japanese developmental state.

This exercise in model building is not intended either to detract from Japanese achievements or to recommend the Japanese model to others. The history of MITI actually reveals a harder lesson than either of these; for all of Japan's alleged borrowing from abroad, the Japanese political genius rests in the identification and use of their own political assets. The development of MITI was a harrowing pro-