MITI and the Japanese miracle

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Welfare ministries to stop the medium and smaller enterprises proposal by arguing that they, too, would lose some jurisdiction, to say nothing of MITI itself. MITI and the Ministry of Construction stopped the energy and housing ideas by utilizing their old boy networks, since neither ministry wanted to lose the petroleum and housing businesses as places for their officials to retire.

The longest continuing struggle in the Japanese government, dating from well before the war, has been over the attempt to take control of the budget away from the Ministry of Finance in order to lodge it in the cabinet or some supraministerial coordinating agency. In 1955 Kono * Ichiro* conceived of an independent budget bureau; in 1963 the Temporary Administrative Investigation Council recommended creation of a system of cabinet assistants to oversee the budget; and in 1970 Kawashima Shojiro* called for the establishment of an Overall Planning Agency (Sogo* Kikaku-cho*). The Ministry of Finance successfully beat back all these proposals. Regardless of what the constitution says, the coordinating power of the Japanese executive branch is exercised through the three annual budgets (general account, special accounts, and government investment), and control over them is in the hands of the Budget Bureau and the Financial Bureau of the Ministry of Finance.

The

Asahi

argues that, because of ministerial rivalry, in foreign affairs Japan can never create a monolithic negotiating positionwhich is not necessarily a bad thing. Contention often develops among Foreign Affairs, Finance, and MITI during any major international negotiations. Each of them maintains its own overseas communications networkForeign Affairs through the regular foreign office cable system, Finance through the telex system of the Bank of Tokyo, and MITI through the telex system of JETRO. According to the

Asahi

, Japan actually has three foreign services, each of them with different policies and each represented overseas. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs is the most internationalist, MITI has historically been protectionist, and the Finance Ministry is fairly internationalist but stingy about spending money for defense or foreign aid. Policy is a result of compromises among these positions, and the compromises change as the power positions of the three ministries shift with political developments.

⁹⁹

The headquarters of a ministry engaged in interministerial struggles is, of course, its home office in the Kasumigaseki district of Tokyo. But in addition to its home office staff and its various old boy networks, client organizations, deliberation councils, and public corporations, each ministry has "assets" (

kabu

) spread throughout the government in the form of transferees, or what the French call

dé

-