MITI and the Japanese miracle

Page 81

ians) that date from the last decades of the Tokugawa shogunate. They see their function in life as the protection of Japanese industries from "foreign pressure."

¹¹⁴

When he was chief of the Trade Promotion Bureau from November 1969 to June 1971, Goto* Masafumi liked to use the derogatory term

keto

* ("hairy Chinese," by extension "unpleasant foreigner") to refer to Japan's competitors.

¹¹⁵

A different perspective is suggested by the former vice-minister Sahashi Shigeru's habitual use of the literary prefix

hei

, meaning "our" in a humble sensea form of expression associated with an

obanto

*, the chief clerk of an old mercantile house or a prewar zaibatsu holding company. When Sahashi spoke of

heikoku

(our country) as if he were a clerk referring to

heisha

(our company), many Japanese thought of him as the obanto* of Japanese capitalism.

¹¹⁶

Nagai Yonosuke* sees still another historical parallel: "With its self-assertiveness, its strong native nationalism, its loyalist posture, . . . and its terrific 'workism,' MITI reminds us of the General Staff Office of the defunct army.''

¹¹⁷

Whatever its roots, MITI's "spirit" has become legendary.

A part of the MITI perspective is impatience with the Anglo-American doctrine of economic competition. After the war MITI had to reconcile itself to the occupation-fostered market system in Japan, but it has always been hostile to American-style price competition and antitrust legislation. Sahashi likes to quote Schumpeter to the effect that the competition that really counts in capitalist systems is not measured by profit margins but by the development of new commodities, new technologies, new sources of supply, and new types of organizations.

¹¹⁸

MITI is highly competitive internationally, but it is often irritated by the disorderly competitive scramble among its domestic clients. As Robert Ozaki says, "Sometimes it is assumed [by MITI] that the adverse effects of private monopoly will not arise if the monopolists are Japanese."

¹¹⁹

During the 1970's many of these old MITI attitudes were modified by a new "internationalism." Nonetheless, Japanese commentators such as Kakuma have some reservations about the depth of the change; he calls the new MITI leadership the "nationalist international faction" and refers to the coming of the "age of the cosmopolitan nationalists."

¹²⁰

MITI men are powerful and outspoken, and the Japanese public enjoys reading about them. Several best-selling novels have been written about them, the best of which is Shiroyama Saburo's*

The Summer of the Bureaucrats

(

Kanryo-tachi

*

no natsu

) of 1975. English novelists sometimes choose bureaucrats as subjects (examples are Maugham's

Ashenden

or le Carré's

Smiley's People

), but economic bureaucrats in