MITI and the Japanese miracle

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When Nakajima resigned as minister on February 9, 1934, he was succeeded for the remainder of the Saito * cabinet by Matsumoto Joji*, the famous legal scholar who later figured as an adviser on the constitution in 1946, and whose draft SCAP rejected in favor of its own. In 1934 Matsumoto favored vigorous prosecution of the Teijin defendants and made life difficult for Yoshino over the matter. Yoshino, however, never said a word on the subject of the Teijin case. He may have felt, along with many others at the time, that the case was a frame-up by the militarists and rightists to destroy ''liberal" elements in politics. If so, his silence can be explained by the fact that it was extremely dangerous in the mid-1930's to contradict the nationalists on any subject. The Teijin case appears in retrospect to have been the equivalent in party politics of the Minobe casethe ouster of Minobe Tatsukichi from Tokyo University on charges of lèse majestéin academic life.

After the Teijin incident the cabinet of Admiral Okada Keisuke (July 1934 to March 1936) sought to dispel the public's (and the military's) doubts about economic administration by establishing a Cabinet Deliberation Council (Naikaku Shingikai)what the press called its "supplementary cabinet"to advise it on economic policies. However, when the prime minister declared that his council was intended "to remove technical economic matters from political interference," the Seiyukai* vigorously opposed the council as a bureaucratic and militaristic device. Partly because of this Seiyukai boycott, the president of the Minseito* and one of Japan's most accomplished political manipulators, Machida Chuji* (18631946), entered the cabinet as MCI minister even though most party politicians shunned Okada's "nonparty" government. Machida retained Yoshino as vice-minister for political reasons of his own, but in retrospect Yoshino believed that he should have resigned at the time. Okada's council was composed of fifteen members from among the "senior statesmen" (

jushin

*, the successors to the Meiji-era

genro

*), peers, political party leaders, and representatives of big business.

In order to service this brain trust, the Okada government also set up a Cabinet Research Bureau (Naikaku Chosa* Kyoku, established by Imperial ordinance 119 of May 11, 1935). This was not the older military-oriented Resources Bureau of 1927, also attached to the cabinet, but a new organ made up of bureaucrats detached on temporary duty from the main ministries to serve in this elite body. Two years later the Cabinet Planning Boardknown at the time as the "economic general staff"came into being by combining the Cabinet Research Bureau and the Resources Bureau.