MITI and the Japanese miracle

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ganization of the Trade Bureau into vertical departments for each market and commodity.

The 1939 plan was considerably more elaborate than the one for 1938. Calculated on the basis of quarters of the fiscal year rather than the whole calendar year, it covered about four hundred commodities grouped into ten master categories (steel, nonferrous metals, chemicals, and so forth), and it established an eightfold priority list for the distribution of raw materials:

⁴¹

A

army munitions

B

navy munitions

C

₁

military reserves (C

_1A

army and C

_1B

navy)

C

₂

materials for the expansion of productive capacity

C

₃

nonmilitary governmental requirements

C

_4i

materials for use in Manchuria and China

C

_4ro

materials for export goods

C

₅

materials for the general population

Even though this plan was more carefully thought out than the first, several factors combined to make it go as haywire as its predecessor. Perhaps the most persistent problem was fighting between the control officers of A and B materials. They regularly interrupted conferences with accusations of plots, and this ultimately led to the military police's arresting some CPB military officers on charges of corruption. Other disputes often had to go to the cabinet for settlement. In addition, after the outbreak of war in Europe on September 1,1939, the British embargoed exports from India, Canada, and Australia, which ruined all import forecasts; and the 1939 drought in western Japan and floods in Taiwan and China forced the government to allocate some 10 percent of its total import capability for food. Until then the planners had assumed that Japan was self-sufficient in food at least. The drought also cut hydroelectric power output and thus caused a decline in domestic production of munitions and export goods.

⁴²

Officials involved with the planssuch as Kaya Okinori (minister of finance during early 1938), Inaba Hidezo* (arrested by the military police in the Cabinet Planning Board incident of 1941, discussed below, and a leading planner of Japan's postwar reconstruction), and Tanaka Shin'ichi (Inaba's successor as the highest-ranking civilian official in the General Affairs Unit)have all written, in regard to the early years of materials mobilization planning, that their concepts and methods were primitive, that their statistical base was supplied by the industries they sought to control, and that competition between