MITI and the Japanese miracle

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minister of MCI, Mitsui Yonematsu, resigned to take up positions as president of the Godo * Fishing Company and of the Karafuto (Sakhalin) Mining Company. He had worked for many years in fishing and mining administration during the MAC and early MCI eras, but he had not intended to resign in 1930. Inoue and Tawara eased him out when he inquired about a shift to director of the Patent Bureau, since he was not fully in tune with Yoshino's TIRB and its policies. As Mitsui's replacement Inoue directed Minister Tawara to appoint Tajima Katsutaro*, class of 1906, and Tawara did sothough with a considerable loss of face to himself personally.

Tajima was an unusual appointment. He had had no experience in any of the ministry's home office bureaus, having spent the later part of his career as head of the Fisheries Bureau during the MAC era, then as a transferee to the Tokyo metropolitan government, and most recently as chief of the Fukuoka Mine Inspectors Bureau. The last was the key to his appointment. Fukuoka was an important post since it exercised supervision over Japan's main coal fields, which supplied fuel to the Yawata steel works. The bureau chief there had to work closely with the powerful zaibatsu coal mine operators. Tajima had apparently developed something of a constituency in Fukuoka and was known to be ambitious to enter politics as a member of the Minseito* party. After his retirement as vice-minister in December 1931, he did join the Minseito and was elected to the Diet as a member from Fukuoka for some three terms. Tajima's appointment in 1930 appeared to the bureaucracy and to the political world as an attempt by the Minseito to take over the MCI. It was partly to overcome the rumors that Vice-Minister Tajima lacked the appropriate political independence for an Imperial bureaucrat that the succeeding Seiyukai* government ousted him and appointed Yoshino in his place. It was rumored that Takahashi Korekiyo himself had a hand in recommending Yoshino, even though Yoshino was only 43 years old and so had to be passed over nine of his seniors and three of his classmates.

During 1930, when Tajima was still vice-minister, Yoshino requested permission to go abroad to investigate the industrial rationalization movement in other countries. He was turned down on the grounds that Finance Minister Inoue thought it inopportune for the actual chief of the TIRB to be out of the country and therefore refused to pay for the trip. Yoshino countered with a proposal that his protégé, Kishi, go in his placeand this was readily approved for other bureaucratic reasons. On October 15, 1929, as part of the Minseito's* deflationary program, the Hamaguchi cabinet had ordered a 10 percent pay cut for all civil and military officials. The idea was very popular