MITI and the Japanese miracle

Page 95

Nakai, thus became the last vice-minister of agriculture and commerce. He in turn promptly appointed Yoshino chief of the Documents Section, where all personnel matters are handled. Yoshino was assisted by a young official in his new section, Kishi Nobusuke, whom Yoshino was watching over and pushing ahead. According to Kishi's memoirs, Shijo * and Yoshino sent all the stubborn and dull bureaucrats to the new agriculture ministry and kept in commerce the flexible and bright onesalthough Kishi thought they had made a mistake in keeping the later vice-minister Takeuchi Kakichi.

²¹

Shijo and Yoshino also arranged one other thing. The Agriculture Ministry moved to new quarters in Kasumigaseki, but Commerce retained and rebuilt on the property it had occupied since 1888. This was located in old Kobiki-cho* ("the sawmill quarter") adjacent to the Kabuki theater and about midway between the Tsukiji fish market and Shimbashi station. Every MAC or MCI bureaucrat who has written his memoirs has recalled the actors, geisha, and "teahouses" in the neighborhood, and some of them have blamed their slow careers on too much

asobi

("play") being readily available.

²²

MCI remained in Kobiki-cho until Tojo* moved it as his new Ministry of Munitions to Kasumigaseki.

With the split into two ministries, the "old testament" days of trade and industrial administration (as MITI historians call it) came to an end. Shijo became the new vice-minister of commerce and industry, a post he held until April 1929, when he resigned and with the assistance of Takahashi entered the holding company of the Yasuda zaibatsu. He also took up the presidencies of the Yasuda Life Insurance Company and the Tokyo Fire Insurance Company (note that MAC-MCI was the governmental organ supervising the insurance business). As a descendant of the Nijo* family he was also created a baronet, and he therefore assumed his seat in the House of Peers. Before leaving MCI, Shijo arranged for the promotion, on July 30, 1928, of Yoshino to Shijo's* old position as chief of the Industrial Affairs Bureau. Three years after that Yoshino became vice-minister.

The internal organization of the new Ministry of Commerce and Industry perpetuated without change the commercial and industrial

(footnote continued from previous page)

Seiyukai* and Diet member from Fukuoka, who in turn protested to Takahashi, president of the Seiyukai and minister of MAC. To settle the whole unpleasant affair, Takahashi asked Nakai to go to Yawata as head of the steel works, and he agreed. Nakai remained at Yawata until 1934, when he became the first president of the new Japan Steel Corporation, of which the Yawata works were the main component. Noda Utaro*, who had intervened with Takahashi, succeeded him as minister of MCI (April to August 1925).