MITI and the Japanese miracle

Page 54

When Kono * first became minister of agriculture in December 1954, he intervened powerfully in the internal personnel affairs of the ministry. His instrument was a bureaucrat named Yasuda Zen'ichiro*, whom he promoted to the post of chief of the Secretariat (in the Ministry of Agriculture, the last step before the vice-ministership and the position responsible for all ministerial appointments) over the heads of many of his seniors. Yasuda then transferred or demoted bureaucrats who did not support Kono. Yasuda was a willing participant in these operations because he hoped to have a political career himself, after retirement, as Kono's* protégé. He ended his bureaucratic service as chief of the Agriculture Ministry's Food Agency (July 1961 to January 1962), and then stood for and lost election to the lower house as a member of the Kono faction.

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Other ministries point to him as a prime example of the disasters that can befall a bureaucrat and a ministry if its members break ranks and allow a politician to use one of them for his own purposes.

Agriculture is often said to be the first ministry to have been "politicized" by the LDP because of the LDP's dependence on the farm vote. However, agriculture ministries are rarely "nonpolitical" in any country. At least one other ministry in Japan, Education, has always been under tight LDP control because of the party's ideological struggle with the communist-dominated teachers' union; there has never been even a pretense of bureaucratic independence at Education. As for MITI, over the years since its creation in 1949, prime ministers and ministers have attempted to gain control and use it for political purposes. MITI bureaucrats have been implacable in their resistance to these efforts, often citing the negative example of Kono and agriculture. We shall analyze some of these MITI cases in detail later in this book, since they have often influenced the basic industrial policies of the ministry.

Some party politician ministers, even activist ones, have been welcomed at MITI because of their effectiveness in getting things done in the Diet: Tanaka Kakuei, Nakasone Yasuhiro, and Komoto* Toshio are examples. Even when relations are good, however, the bureaucrats have in the back of their minds the danger of corruption when dealing with nonbureaucratic party politicians (corruption charges have been brought in postwar Japan against ex-bureaucrat politicians, but they have usually been make to stick only in the case of tojinha* politicians). If a minister should attempt to name the vice-minister (by custom the outgoing MITI vice-minister names his own successor) or otherwise alter the internal norms of bureaucratic life, warfare is inevitable. MITI officials have been known to cancel ministerial confer-