MITI and the Japanese miracle

Page 129

the only post still ahead of him was the director's. Because he was considered too junior for that, although he was regarded as an excellent legal technician, the bureau asked Yoshino to take him back as a bureau chief in MCI. Yoshino was glad to oblige, and in September 1933 he appointed Murase chief of the Commercial Affairs Bureau. Murase held that post until Yoshino's resignation.

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Murase thus had no experience in industrial administration or in the TIRB. He leaned toward the commercial wing of MCI, which was oriented to medium and smaller enterprises, the insurance business, the stock exchanges, and tradeand which reflected the business world's wary approach to the controlled economy. Murase's greatest achievement as chief of the Commercial Affairs Bureau was securing the passage in 1936 of the Commercial and Industrial Cooperatives Central Depository Law, the enabling legislation for the Shoko* Chukin* Bank. This was and is today the leading governmental financial organ devoted exclusively to support of medium and smaller enterprises. Murase became known as a champion of the small businessman, and after the Pacific War he served from February 1953 to February 1958 as chairman of the bank he had founded in 1936.

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While Murase was settling in at Kobiki-cho*, Kishi was in Hsinking greeting old friends and colleagues. Kishi himself had been directly responsible for sending most of them there. During his service as Industrial Policy Section chief and as Documents Section chief (193235), Kishi had received many requests from the Kwantung Army for MCI officials to staff its new government of Manchukuo. This government was divided into a series of departments (

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) equivalent to the ministries in Japan, each with a Manchurian as director and a Japanese as deputy director. The General Affairs Agency (Somu-cho*), whose director and deputy director were both Japanese, supervised the whole puppet structure. The army asked the ministries in Tokyo to send reform bureaucrats to serve temporarily in these "guidance" posts, and Kishi was only too willing to oblige. The first director of

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When Murase was forced from the vice-ministership in October 1939 by the "return of the Manchurians," Ikeda Seihin, the Mitsui leader and minister of MCI during the second half of 1938, arranged for his appointment as director of the Cabinet Legislation Bureau. He remained there until the appointment of the Tojo* cabinet, when he resigned from the government. On April 7, 1945, Prime Minister (Admiral) Suzuki Kantaro* asked him to return as director of the Cabinet Legislation Bureau in order to assist in terminating the Pacific War. He stayed in the post until after the surrender. On August 28, 1946, the occupation authorities purged him, and on October 13, 1950, they depurged him. He became an adviser to MITI on March 1, 1953. After heading the Shoko* Chukin* Bank, a public corporation under MITI's control, he became president between 1961 and 1967 of the Japan Electronic Computer Company, one of MITI's main instruments for promoting the domestic computer industry.