MITI and the Japanese miracle

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nese home islands should attempt to mobilize vast quantities of men and munitions on the scale expended from 1914 to 1918 by France, for example, then the effort would certainly bankrupt Japan, no matter what the outcome."

³

The financial panic of April 1927 and the coming to power of a Seiyukai* government headed by a military officer, General Tanaka Giichi, afforded an opportunity to try again to set up an economic planning unit with a military outlook.

On May 26, 1927, the government established a Resources Bureau (Shigen Kyoku) as a semidetached organ of the cabinet. Because a heavy military presence in the old Munitions Bureau had led to conflicts with other ministries, this time the government toned down the military element, recruited bureaucrats from other ministries, and set up a joint public-private deliberation council to discuss resource questions. The staff of the Resources Bureau was smallonly five peoplebut MCI sent to it one of its important young officials, Uemura Kogoro*, class of 1918, who was destined to become in May 1968 the president of Keidanren, the most influential post in the country for making policy for the business sector. Uemura spent the rest of his bureaucratic career working in the "economic general staff," where he rose to the position of vice-president of the Cabinet Planning Board in 1940. His position in the Resources Bureau was one of the earliest links between MCI and the military planners before the two were formally merged in 1943 in the Ministry of Munitions.

⁴

The Resources Bureau of 1927 undertook the first measures of genuine economic planning in Japan. It pioneered the "materials mobilization plans" (to be discussed later in this chapter) that dominated the economic landscape after the outbreak of war with China. Its main achievement in the late 1920's, however, was to sponsor the Resources Investigation Law (Shigen Chosa* Ho*, law number 53 of April 12, 1929), which required private enterprises to report to the government on their productive and financial capabilities. Since the Resources Bureau had no operating functions (lest it conflict with the territories of the established ministries), MCI was authorized to enforce the law by inspecting factories and mines to determine their resource potential. This was a significant development during peacetime. Interestingly enough, article 2 of this law refers to the need for "plans for the controlled operation" (

tosei

*

un'yo

*

keikaku

) of enterprises, and this use of tosei* in a military economic statute is thought to be the origin of the term in the title of the Important Industries Control Law of 1931, even though Yoshino has denied that his law had a military purpose.

⁵

If the financial panic of 1927 brought MCI to life as an organization,