MITI and the Japanese miracle

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man to study abroad and to widen his horizons. Yoshino stayed in San Francisco for a year and a half, auditing courses in labor economics at Berkeley (he specifically recalls Professor Ira Cross), traveling around the country, and receiving an overseas salary of ¥245 per month compared with the ¥45 he would have been paid in Tokyo.

The efforts and the politics of people like Yamamoto were not particularly appreciated among the dominant agriculturalists within the ministry. Their orientation was physiocratic (

nohonshugi

*), and they felt a philosophical sympathy for the rural way of life, so they were not pleased by the rise of industrialism or by the growing influence of the zaibatsu. Soejima Sempachi, a commercial-track official who was nonetheless serving as chief of the Agricultural Policy Section at the time of the 1918 "rice riots," later charged that the whole Agricultural Affairs Bureau was sympathetic to the interests of landlords.

¹²

This was probably true, but it must be understood that agricultural bureaucrats also represented one wing of then current liberal opinion. To them the most serious social problem of the nation was rural poverty and tenancy, a problem to which they believed the government was insufficiently attentive, particularly in comparison to the privileges it extended to the zaibatsu.

This social consciousness of the agricultural bureaucrats is sometimes called "Ishiguroism," after the great elder statesman of agricultural administration, Ishiguro Tadaatsu (18841960). From 1919 to 1925 Ishiguro was chief of the Agricultural Policy Section, Agricultural Affairs Bureau, in MAC. He became vice-minister of agriculture in 1934 and minister of agriculture in the second Konoe (194041) and Suzuki (1945) cabinets. He was famous for recruiting social activists to his ministry (for example, the post-World War II socialist politician Wada Hiroo), and for donating a part of his salary during the 1930's to aid tenant farmers. During the period of World War I he and his followers imbued the ministry with a sense of mission to protect the small tenant farmer, and the Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry that resulted from the break-up of MAC was regarded as the most "progressive" in the interwar government.

¹³

The dominance of the agricultural career path in MAC is also revealed by its personnel deployments. The ministry grew from 2,422 total employees in 1890 to 7,918 in 1920 and 8,362 at the time of the split, but of this final figure 5,879 went to the Ministry of Agriculture in 1925, and only 2,483 to MCI.

¹⁴

World War I affected Japan's economy and economic bureaucracy in many significant ways. The war boom itself was extraordinary. In 1914 Japan's total exports and imports combined amounted to about ¥1.2