MITI and the Japanese miracle

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never achieved due to the resistance of the private sector. Tsuji thinks that SCAP never fully appreciated the implications of what it was doing when it forced the transfer of the zaibatsu's share of power to the government because SCAP, in accordance with American governmental theory, regarded the bureaucracy as a "nonpolitical instrument," not a political body. Moreover, SCAP was itself an official bureaucratic organizationthe U.S. Armyand disinclined to question institutions comparably based on professional, if not necessarily politically accountable, service to the nation.

The second reason for the expansion of bureaucratic influence was the relative incompetence of the political forces SCAP had fostered to replace the old order. Cadres of the old political parties brought again to leadership of the government by the new constitution had never (or not for almost twenty years) exercised political power. Moreover, some of the most competent among them had been purged. The American-style tradition in which party leaders become deeply involved in administrative affairs and the drafting of legislation had never been well established in Japan in any case. Under the Katayama government, created on May 24, 1947, the cabinet ministers were so lacking in expertise and so unfamiliar with legislation that everyone had his vice-minister sitting next to him in the cabinet room in order to advise him on what to do.

³³

This state of affairs ended in January 1949 with the establishment of the third Yoshida government. Yoshida Shigeru (18781967) was himself a former high-ranking bureaucrat of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and he established the "bureaucratic leadership structure" (

kanryo

*

shudo

*

taisei

) that has formed the mainstream of Japanese politics to the present day.

The twenty-fourth general election of January 1949 brought into the Diet 42 new members who were former bureaucrats; in most cases they were also protégés and allies of Yoshida, who had encouraged them to run. Among this new class of politicians were Ikeda Hayato (18991965), recently retired as vice-minister of finance, who became Yoshida's new finance minister, and Sato* Eisaku (19011975), recently retired as vice-minister of transportation and soon to become chief secretary of Yoshida's Liberal Party. Shortly before the election, on December 24, 1948, Kishi Nobusuke (b. 1896) was released from Sugamo Prison as an unindicted class A war criminal. He had served as vice-minister of commerce and industry under the Abe, Yonai, and Konoe cabinets and as minister of commerce and industry and viceminister of munitions in the Tojo* cabinet. On April 29, 1952, he was depurged, and a year later he was also elected to the Diet. These three