MITI and the Japanese miracle

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outside interests, particularly business interests. And this requires that a minister be a powerful politicianwho may have ideas of his own. If he is also a former bureaucrat, perhaps even one from the ministry to which he has been appointed, the relationship can get quite complex.

Ministry of Finance officials claim to fear powerful ministers from their own service, men such as Kaya Okinori, Ikeda Hayato, or Fukuda Takeo.

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Ikeda, in particular, was always an activist minister in whatever ministry he headed; and he became famous for shaking up the Ministry of Finance in order to remove fiscal conservatives who were blocking his plans for rapid economic growth, and also in order to enlist the ministry in support of his own political ambitions.

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The trade and industry bureaucrats generally liked Ikeda when he was MITI minister, largely because they agreed with him, but when they disagreedas for example over the pace of trade liberalization in 1960he won. He also once gave orders that MITI men could not talk to the press without his approval because he was tired of reading in the newspapers about new economic initiatives that he knew nothing about.

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He did not, however, interfere in ministerial personnel affairs.

Ikeda represented the unusual case of an ex-bureaucrat being an activist minister. Although somewhat trying for bureaucrats, such types do not pose a real threat to them. Much more serious are activist ministers from a party politician's (tojinha*) background. Their efforts to exert influence over a ministry can set off shock waves throughout Japanese politics that reverberate for years; details of cases in which this has occurred are repeated in every Japanese book on the central government. Probably the most famous case is that of Kono* Ichiro* (18981965) and his efforts to bring the Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry under his personal control.

Kono was an old follower of Hatoyama Ichiro in the prewar Seiyukai*. After his depurge in 1951 he returned to politics as an opponent of Yoshida's bureaucratic mainstream. With the unification of the two conservative parties into the LDP, he served as minister of agriculture and forestry in the first Hatoyama cabinet, as director-general of the Economic Planning Agency in the first Kishi cabinet, and as agriculture minister and then construction minister in the second and third Ikeda cabinets. As minister of construction in 1964, he was in charge of the Tokyo Olympics, Japan's debut on the postwar world scene as a rising economic power. After Ikeda's death Kono led a major effort by the combined tojinha to seize control of the party, but he was defeated by Sato* Eisaku and died shortly thereafter.