MITI and the Japanese miracle

Page 40

the old "way of a warrior" (

bushido

*).

¹⁶

Of course, many prewar bureaucrats actually came from samurai families, where the ethos of service persisted for decades after the samurai as a class had been broken up. As Black and his colleagues observe, "With the disbandment of samurai administrations throughout Japan, a civilian bureaucracy was formed, roughly one-tenth as large as the total number of former samurai household heads. For the most part drawn initially from the samurai class, and enjoying high status as the loyal representatives of the emperor, rather than the shogun or daimyo as before, these bureaucrats acquired some of the aura previously reserved for samurai."

¹⁷

This "aura" formerly attached to samurai can still be found in some of the terminology now associated with bureaucrats. For example, the common term for governmental authorities is "those above" (

okami

). It is also said that Japanese do not normally question the authority of the government because they respect its "samurai sword" (

denka no

hoto

*), which refers directly to a samurai family's heirloom sword. Such a jeweled sword symbolized the status of a samurai household rather than being a weapon designed for killing people. Yamanouchi says that use of the term reflects the popular consciousness of the law as being a symbol of authority, not something that the possessor of authority need actually use. The change from the old constitution to the new, Yamanouchi argues, did little to change this attitude. For example, the effectiveness of MITI's informal administrative guidance is said to rest in the final analysis on its "samurai sword": both the government and industry find it more convenient to work on this basis rather than through the actual swords of litigation and penalties.

¹⁸

During the 1930's, when the political parties were under strenuous attack from the militarists, both the civilian and military bureaucracies extended the scope of their activities into areas they had previously left untouched. Given the sociological weakness of the parties in the 1920's despite their political prominence, Duus and Okimoto suggest that "the 1930s represented not a breakdown of 'democratic' government, but the stabilization of bureaucratic government"a confirmation of tendencies that had been latent since the Meiji era.

¹⁹

Craig proposes that the 1930's saw the "indigenization" of the values and institutions that had been borrowed from the West during the Meiji era.

²⁰

However one evaluates the decade and a half from 1930 to 1945, Japan's government was much more bureaucratic and state dominated at the end of this period than it had been at the beginning.

At the war's end this bureaucratic government had to face fierce domestic criticism for the disasters it had brought to the nation, as well