MITI and the Japanese miracle

Page 42

tionsand only 9 from the Ministry of Finance. Of the 1,800 civilian bureaucrats purged, 70 percent were police and other officials from the Home Ministry.

²²

Amaya Naohiro of MITI feels that the purge of business leaders, if not of bureaucrats, was very helpful to the postwar economy; he compares it to the purge of feudal leaders that actually accompanied the Meiji Restoration.

²³

The postwar economic purge eliminated from industrial life the rentier classwhat Weber calls the "property classes" (

Besitzklassen

) as distinct from the "professional classes" (

Erwerbklassen

), which includes entrepreneurs and highly qualified managersand thereby greatly rationalized the zaibatsu, as well as allowing for the creation of new zaibatsu. Perhaps the most important rentier interest eliminated from economic life was the Imperial Household itself, which had been a significant owner of shares in the prewar and wartime "national policy companies."

²⁴

But the purge did not really touch the economic bureaucrats themselves.

SCAP's attempts at positive reform of the bureaucratic system as a whole are widely acknowledged to have failed. Foster Roser, a member of the Blaine Hoover Mission, which wrote the National Public Service Law (law 120 of October 21, 1947) on the basis of then current American civil service legislation, concludes: "The proposed civil service law was submitted to the Diet in the fall of 1947. Unfortunately, the nucleus of feudalistic, bureaucratic thinking gentlemen within the core of the Japanese Government was astute enough to see the dangers of any such modern public administration law to their tenure and the subsequent loss of their power. The law which was finally passed by the Diet was a thoroughly and completely emasculated instrument compared with that which had been recommended by the mission."

²⁵

Blaine Hoover, former president of the Civil Service Assembly, knew nothing of the efforts made by the military during the 1930's and during the war to bring the ministries under centralized control and take personnel selection and promotion matters out of their handsnor did he know of the successful efforts by the Home and Finance ministries to block these earlier attempts. The ministries had years of experience in sabotaging civil service reform movements.

²⁶

Hoover's law did set up a National Personnel Authority attached to the cabinet to conduct examinations, set pay scales, and hold grievance hearings. But the law did not establish in either the cabinet or the prime minister's office the powers and staff necessary to control the ministries; in particular, the powers of budget-making remained