MITI and the Japanese miracle

Page 145

During the Pacific War the Home Ministry appointed Yoshino governor of Aichi prefecture, and throughout 1944 he worked hard trying to cope with the bombing of Nagoya and with the death in his city of the chief Chinese puppet, Wang Ching-wei, who had been hospitalized there after an assassination attempt in China. Yoshino was purged but not tried during the occupation.

On April 24, 1953, Yoshino was elected to the House of Councillors from his native Miyagi prefecture. He had run on a platform of "economic independence" (from U.S. aid) and "rebuild Japan's economy." In the Diet he served as chairman of the upper house's Commerce and Industry Committee (where he was more of a problem for MITI than the ministry anticipated), and then as minister of transportation in the third Hatoyama cabinet (195556).

Yoshino never seemed to have any qualms about tapping the connections he had made during his bureaucratic service. Back in June 1934, while he was still vice-minister, he had helped Zen Keinosuke (18871951), Fujihara Ginjiro * (18691960), and other business leaders to establish the Japan Mutual Life Insurance Company (Nihon Dantai Seimei Hoken Kai), a company promoted by the prewar predecessor of the Japan Federation of Employers' Associations (Nikkeiren) to provide life insurance at reasonable rates for industrial workers. (Zen was a school classmate of Yoshino's and a fellow MAC official from 1914 to 1926. He resigned to become the secretary and a director of the Japan Industrial Club. After the war he became the first director-general of the Economic Stabilization Board. Fujihara was the founder of the Mitsui-connected Oji* Paper Company and became MCI minister during the first half of 1940.)

In January 1952, following the death of Zen Keinosuke the previous November, Yoshino succeeded him as chairman of the Japan Mutual Life Insurance Company, a post he retained for the next thirteen years. Yoshino retired as a member of the Diet in May 1959 and devoted himself to service as president of Musashi College, a position he held concurrently with his other commitments from 1956 to 1965. He died May 9, 1971, at the age of 84. Kishi Nobusuke delivered the eulogy at his funeral.

During 1938, in Tokyo, the new MCI minister Ikeda and vice-minister Murase got along fine. They liked each other, and both saw the world in essentially the same (commercial) terms; they shared the belief that economic control should mean self-imposed control by civilian industrial leaders themselves. Ikeda led the fight in the government to prevent the state-control view from prevailingShiroyama calls him the leader of the "status quo faction"and he established