MITI and the Japanese miracle

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ment of Prime Minister (General) Terauchi enacted the Munitions Industries Mobilization Law (Gunju Kogyo * Doin* Ho*). It was Japan's first basic law relating to industrial control during wartime. It defined military supplies broadly and authorized the government after a declaration of war to supervise, use, or expropriate the industries producing them. Most of its provisions were never enforced during World War I, but it was still on the books in 1937, and it was implemented during the early stages of the "China Incident" (the Diet asked for a distinction between a "state of war" and a "state of incident") before the National General Mobilization Law of 1938 replaced it.

¹

The 1918 law was virtually an afterthought of Japan's participation in World War I. But in order to prepare for the possible need to implement the law, the government on May 31, 1918, set up a Munitions Bureau (Gunju Kyoku) as a semidetached unit of the cabinet to prepare economic mobilization plans and to gather statistics on munitions industries. Its first chief, Hara Shoichiro* of the navy, worked hard at these tasks, but he found it almost impossible to get cooperation from the established ministries. On May 15, 1920, the government sought to lower the visibility of the bureau by merging it with the cabinet's Statistical Bureau to create a new agency called the Census Board (Kokusei-in). This idea did not work any better than the first onethe military officers and statisticians squabbled over turfand on November 30, 1922, with the military somewhat in disgrace because of the Siberian expedition and with the government trying to cut costs, the Census Board was abolished. The government transferred all the mobilization plans and accumulated statistics to MAC and from it to MCI, where they greatly enhanced the resources of the Secretariat's Statistical Section. Murase Naokai, the vice-minister of MCI from 1936 to 1939 and a very important figure in our later discussions in this chapter, was working in the cabinet at the time the Census Board was abolished. He says that he recognized that these mobilization materials would be useful to his ministry in administering industrial policy, and he implies that he had a hand in having them transferred there.

²

During the mid-1920'sthe period of "Taisho* democracy"the military was forced to drop its efforts to plan for economic mobilization, but by 1927 interest had revived. Many military officers had had a chance to study and absorb the lessons of World War I, and they were concerned about the growing economic might of Russia after the consolidation of the Bolshevik revolution. During 1927 General (then Major) Ishiwara Kanji, the chief economic architect of Manchukuo, wrote, "If national mobilization was taken to mean that the Japa-