MITI and the Japanese miracle

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was significant and is in need of detailed study, then the question still remains why this book adopts the particular time frame of 192575. Why look at the prewar and wartime eras when the miracle occurred only in postwar Japan? There are several reasons. First, although industrial policy and MITI's "national system" for administering it are the subjects of primary interest in this study, the leaders of MITI and other Japanese realized only very late in the game that what they were doing added up to an implicit theory of the developmental state. That is to say, MITI produced no theory or model of industrial policy until the 1960's at the earliest, and not until the creation of the Industrial Structure Council (Sangyo * Kozo* Shingikai) in 1964 was analytical work on industrial policy begun on a sustained basis. All participants are agreed on this. Amaya quotes Hegel about the owl of Minerva spreading her wings at dusk. He also thinks that maybe it would have been just as well if the owl had never awakened at all, for he concludes with hindsight that the fatal flaw of MITI's prized but doomed Special Measures Law for the Promotion of Designated Industries of 196263 (a major topic of Chapter 7) was that it made explicit what had long been accepted as implicit in MITI's industrial policy.

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As late as 1973 MITI was writing that Japan's industrial policy just grew, and that only during the 1970's did the government finally try to rationalize and systematize it.

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Therefore, an individual interested in the Japanese system has no set of theoretical works, no locus classicus such as Adam Smith or V. I. Lenin, with which to start. This lack of theorizing has meant that historical research is necessary in order to understand how MITI and industrial policy "just grew." Certain things about MITI are indisputable: no one ever planned the ministry's course from its creation as the Ministry of Commerce and Industry (MCI) in 1925, to its transformation into the Ministry of Munitions (MM) in 1943, to its reemergence as the MCI in 1945, down to its reorganization as MITI in 1949. Many of MITI's most vital powers, including their concentration in one ministry and the ministry's broad jurisdiction, are all unintended consequences of fierce intergovernmental bureaucratic struggles in which MITI sometimes "won" by losing. This history is well known to ministerial insidersit constitutes part of their tradition and is a source of their high esprit de corps but it is not well known to the Japanese public and is virtually unknown to foreigners.

Another reason for going back into history is that all the insiders cite the prewar and wartime eras as the time when they learned

how

industrial policy worked. As will become clear in subsequent chap-