MITI and the Japanese miracle

Page 93

adopted by a lower-status samurai of the late Tokugawa Sendai

han

. The feudal han sent him to America in the late 1860's to study English, and in 1873, at the age of 19, he obtained a position in the new Meiji government. In 1886, at the age of 32, he became the first chief of the Patent Bureau in the new Ministry of Agriculture and Commerce, thus obtaining an intimate knowledge of the ministry he came to head in 1924. Three years after becoming a MAC bureau chief, he resigned to enter business, at which he was unusually successful. During the Russo-Japanese War he emerged as one of the key financiers of Japan, and by 1907 he was an appointed peer and a baron. In 1911 he became president of the Bank of Japan, and after that he went into politics.

In 1913 Takahashi became minister of finance in the same cabinet in which Yamamoto Tatsuo served as minister of agriculture and commerce. After the assassination of Hara in 1921, Takahashi briefly became prime minister (192122). However, antiparty forces were attempting to reestablish their supremacy, and they organized a series of nonparty bureaucratic governments. In order to resist this movement, Takahashi took the unusual step of resigning his title (he was a viscount by then) and his legal position as head of his family, thereby again becoming what of course he had been borna commoner. He then stood for election to the House of Representatives in the district of the late Hara Kei in Iwate prefecture. After a difficult campaign he won. He and his colleagues forced the bureaucratic government of Kiyoura to resign, a government was formed based on a coalition of all the political parties, and in June 1924 Takahashi again accepted a ministerial portfolio, that of agriculture and commerce. It was as the last minister of MAC that Takahashi presided over the split. (After this term in office Takahashi went on to serve as minister of finance in four more cabinets, until he also was assassinated on February 26, 1936, in the abortive military coup d'etat.)

²⁰

When Takahashi took up the MAC post in 1924, he was known to favor the commercial side of the ministry. He held positive views about the need for governmental promotion of international trade and protection of Japan's growing industries (such as steel)views that were anathema to the landlords and therefore to their association, the Teikoku Nokai*, which opposed imported food but at the same time wanted no duties on imported fertilizer. Because a coalition government was ruling at the time, and because Takahashi was still president of the Seiyukai* party, it was possible to act on the Teikoku Nokai's* petition for a separate agricultural ministry without the political divisions in the Diet that had frustrated action in the past.