MITI and the Japanese miracle

Page 124

In 1935 the Cabinet Research Bureau was the stronghold of the variously termed "new bureaucrats" (

shinkanryo

*), "reform bureaucrats" (

kakushin

kanryo

*)or, in Nakamura Takafusa's description, civilian bureaucrats who were attracted by Nazi ideology.

¹²

Ide and Ishida bluntly define the reform bureaucrats as "anti-liberal, anti-parties, nationalistic, pro-military, pro-fascist, and above all in favor of strengthening governmental control."

¹³

They were found in all ministries and rose to influence after the assassination of Inukai as part of the vigorous intrabureaucratic competition to fill the vacuum left by the political parties. By cooperating with the military, whether for ideological reasons or just because that was the way the wind was blowing, some bureaucrats rapidly advanced their own careers.

In old-line ministries such as Finance and Foreign Affairs, the mainstream of bureaucratic leadership tried to resist the growing influence of the military, but these ministries tended to lose power over the decade to the ministries that cooperated, such as MCI. Within MCI Yoshino was critical of the reform bureaucrats as "flatterers of the military," even though his protégé Kishi was a model reform bureaucrat and Yoshino himself was in good favor with the military because of his essentially technocratic political stance.

¹⁴

Yoshino also recognized that the admission of military officers on detached service into MCI, a practice he had authorized for the Fuel Bureau and several other new units, affected the ministry's personnel affairs. The militarists regularly used their political power to block promotions of young officials whom they considered insufficiently "reformist." Most of the officials working in industrial administration, as distinct from commercial administration, became reform bureaucrats to some extent, and this led to a factional alignment under Yoshino's successors and under Kishi that would affect the ministry for decades to come.

The military equivalent of the reform bureaucratsthe

kakushin

bakuryo

*, or "reform staff officers"looked on the reform bureaucrats as possible civilian replacements for the old political party leaders, whom they held to be corrupt and to constitute prime obstacles to the building of a "national defense state" in Japan. In October 1934 the Army Ministry published an inflammatory pamphlet calling for national mobilization, opposition to "classes that live by unearned profit," and the expansion of production and trade under state control. To implement this program the army advocated that its cadres make alliances with ''new bureaucrats," and the term thereby entered popular parlance.

¹⁵

One important source of reform bureaucrats was officials who had served in Manchuria as transferees after the proclamation in March