MITI and the Japanese miracle

Page 67

forced early retirement. Sahashi has often denounced it as irrational, even though he was a past master at manipulating it. By the 1970's both the bureaucrats and the public were showing signs of irritation with the system. In 1974 an official rocked MITI by refusing to resign after he had been tapped and told it was time to go. Hayashi Shintaro *, spring class of 1947 and a Ph.D. in economics, had been chief of the Industrial Location and Environmental Protection Bureau for less than a year when he was asked to resign. Even though he had excellent job offers from private industry, he refused them on the grounds that his current work was important and that it was poor administration to change officials before they could even begin to be effective in their posts. Hayashi was liked in the ministry; he had become famous for developing the postwar Japanese sewing machine industry into a thriving export business, and he had served for several years in the JETRO office in West Germany, where he had studiedas MITI habitually puts it"how American capital overran the Western European economy."

⁷⁵

His refusal to resign won praise from some younger MITI officials and from the press. Nonetheless, he was reassigned to the Secretariat with no work to do and took a cut in pay. Shortly thereafter he resigned and became vice-president of Jasco Corporation, a big chain of retail stores in the Osaka and Nagoya regions.

In contrast to the views of Sahashi and Hayashi, Ojimi* Yoshihisa, a vice-minister, defends the system. He argues that strict rules of seniority and early retirement make Japan's top bureaucrats more youthful and energetic than those of other countries, and that because of their vigor they can generate more good new ideas. At the same time, the system of senior-junior (sempai-kohai*) relations, which extends beyond the period of bureaucratic service, ensures that their actions are watched by men with great experience.

⁷⁶

It should be added that an additional result of the system of early retirement and subsequent reemployment in big business or politics is another link between a ministry and its main clients. The practice of bureaucratic descent from heaven thus generates one more kind of factional tie among the central groups of Japanese societyfactions based on financial considerations (zaibatsu, in the nonspecific sense of the term).

As we have already seen, state bureaucrats in Japan retire early from government service and then obtain new employment in big business, public corporations, or politics. This practice is obviously open to abuse, and many Japanese commentators have charged that it has been abused. MITI reporters, for example, argue that a wise bureaucrat will use his years as a section chief to generate new ideas and put pressure on the business community to adopt them, but that as a