MITI and the Japanese miracle

Page 38

strated their talent in impartial examinations, was clearly an improvement over Satsuma and Choshu * dominance. The political parties were an alternative to state officialdom, but they always suffered from the weakness of having arrived second on the political scene. The bureaucracy claimed to speak for the national interest and characterized the parties as speaking only for local or particular interests. As Japan industrialized, the parties slowly gained clout as representatives of zaibatsu and other propertied interests, but they never developed a mass base. One reason was the careful control exercised over the enlargement of the franchise (see Table 2). Another reason was that one house of the Diet, the House of Peers, was dominated by the bureaucracy, which arranged for the direct Imperial appointment of its senior retired members to the Peers, where they easily outclassed the titled members in political skill.

¹²

In short, whether the military and civilian bureaucrats of the post-Meiji era were really the most capable leaders of the nation became a moot question: they had effectively preempted most of the centers of power from which they might be challenged. There were many fights, and the final outcome was not a foregone conclusion, but ultimately a bureaucratic career became the most important route to political power. For example, not a single minister of the Tojo* cabinet, installed in October 1941, had served in the Diet as an elected member.

Prewar bureaucrats were not "civil servants" but rather "officials of the Emperor" (

tenno

*

no kanri

) appointed by him and answerable only to him. Imperial appointment bestowed on them the status of

kan

, the primitive meaning of which in its Chinese original is the residence of a mandarin who presides over a city, and which still retains some of this early meaning in its contemporary usage to refer to judges (according to one legal authority, kan connotes officials with power who are not highly constrained by law).

¹³

This high social status linked them back in time to the samurai and forward to the postwar bureaucrats in their possession of intrinsic authority rather than extrinsic, or legal-rational, office. It meant that they were largely free of external constraints. "The present-day bureaucrat," writes Henderson, "is not, of course, identical with the warrior bureaucrat of the Tokugawa regime or even the new university-trained Imperial bureaucrat of prewar Japan. But they have all, until recently, been largely above the law in the sense of independent judicial review." Rather than a rule of law, Henderson finds that "a rule of bureaucrats prevails.''

¹⁴

Isomura and Kuronuma concur. Even in the postwar world, they argue, Japan has had an administration "for the sake of the citizenry" and not an administration carried out with the "participation of the citizenry." In