MITI and the Japanese miracle

Page 112

name of profits. Right-wingers assassinated Dan Takuma, the chief executive officer of Mitsui, and he was succeeded by the Harvard-educated Ikeda Seihin, who became MCI minister in 1938. After taking over at Mitsui, Ikeda carried out a public

tenko

* (conversion to patriotism) on behalf of his company. One important reason Ikeda took this action was that the military and some members of the economic bureaucracy were beginning to think in terms not of working with the zaibatsu in cartels but of dominating themperhaps even nationalizing themthrough the exercise of state power.

On December 21, 1931, as part of the Seiyukai's* housecleaning after taking over from the Minseito*, Yoshino Shinji was named vice-minister. He held the post until October 7, 1936. Although the TIRB had been associated with the Minseito party, the Seiyukai* retained it because of the positive appeal of its ideology and because Yoshino, who was thought to have Seiyukai sympathies even though he was publicly neutral, was now in charge of the ministry.

Within trade and industry circles the years 1931 to 1936 came to be known as the era of the Yoshino-Kishi line. This meant government promotion of heavy and chemical industrialization and a stress on industrial rationalization as the main objective of MCI policy. During his vice-ministership, Yoshino first promoted Kishi to the post of chief of the Industrial Policy Section (January 1932, the month after Yoshino took office), then chief of the Documents Section (December 1933), and finally chief of the Industrial Affairs Bureau (April 1935). Kishi was clearly on the "elite course," and he was expected to advance to the vice-ministership shortly after his mentor gave it up. Kishi did eventually become vice-minister, but a three-year Manchurian interlude intervened first. For although there was an orientation within the ministry that could be called a Yoshino-Kishi line, there were also differences between the two men. If Yoshino will always be identified with industrial "self-control," Kishi will always be identified with ''state control" of industry.

The first phase of modern Japanese industrial policy seems remote from the postwar economic miracle, but it is, in fact, directly relevant to it for several reasons. During the 1920's Japan faced economic problems comparable in kind and in severity to those of the early 1950's: the need to restore competitive ability in international trade, the need to reorganize industry in order to achieve economies of scale and to take advantage of new technological developments, and the need to increase the productivity of the labor force. During the period from