MITI and the Japanese miracle

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important administrative change after the outbreak of the China Incident took place outside MCI; this was the establishment on October 23, 1937, of the Cabinet Planning Board (Kikaku-in)."

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On May 14, 1937, as a preparatory step toward planning and state control, the Hayashi cabinet had reorganized and strengthened the Cabinet Research Bureau of 1935 and renamed it the Cabinet Planning Agency (Kikaku-cho*). When the Konoe government took office in the following month, it decided to merge the military research unit of 1927 (the Resources Bureau) and the Planning Agency into a new and very powerful organ that would, in theory, command and coordinate the activities of the various ministries. This was the Cabinet Planning Board (CPB). It brought together military officers, detached reform bureaucrats, planners from Manchuria, and (unwittingly) some of the leading Marxist economists of the time into what was hailed as the "economic general staff." It is directly relevant to the history of MITI for several reasons. First, many MCI officials worked there (or, alternatively, many former CPB officials entered MCI after the war). Second, it was merged in 1943 with MCI to create the Ministry of Munitions. And third, it is the precedent for the postwar Economic Stabilization Board and Economic Planning Agency, both of which MITI has either strongly influenced or dominated. Most important, the CPB's method of planning necessitated the reorganization of MCI into industry-specific bureaus, and these were perpetuated in MITI until 1973.

When first set up, the CPB was divided into six departments: general affairs, domestic plans, financial plans, industrial plans (Uemura Kogoro* was the first head of this department), communications plans, and research. In 1939, after the dismal failure of its first efforts at economic planning, the CPB was reorganized into a secretariat, first department (general policy for the expansion of national strength), second department (overall mobilization), third department (labor and civilian mobilization), fourth department ("materials mobilization plans" and "expansion of production plans"), fifth department (trade and finance), sixth department (transportation and communications), and seventh department (science and technology). It underwent several more minor changes in later years (the fourth department, for example, was merged with the second department). Prince Konoe named his old professor of law at Kyoto University, Taki Masao, to be the first president of the CPB, but subsequent presidents and vice-presidents were reform bureaucrats or military officers (see Table 9). The CPB's initial staff consisted of 116 career officials, technicians, and temporarily attached specialists.