MITI and the Japanese miracle

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the precedent of businessmen serving in the cabinet in order to restrain the military, one that his successors Fujihara Ginjiro * and Kobayashi Ichizo* continued.

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During late 1938 Ikeda clashed violently with Home Minister (Admiral) Suetsugu Nobumasa over the attempts to enforce articles 6 (labor control) and 11 (limitation on dividends and forced loans) of the mobilization law. Suetsugu took the view that if the government were going to control the people, it should also control the capitalists. Ikeda was not completely successful in preventing this, but as Tiedemann remarks, ''In the future, control over capital would become tighter, but Ikeda had set the pattern for making the controls on the business community the lightest of all in the war economy."

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A result of his battle was that Ikeda was forced to leave the cabinet, and in January 1939 the Konoe government resigned in favor of the Hiranuma government, which was conservative but not necessarily pro-state control.

In order to eliminate the defects in the TMCB system and also to make MCI conform more closely in its overall operation to the mission it had been given by the economic general staff, Murase totally reorganized the Ministry of Commerce and Industry during early 1939. Despite his lack of sympathy with the controlled economy, Murase's reform was ironically the single most important structural change of MCI in the direction of greater control until the creation of MITI. Maeda Yasuyuki argues that Murase's vertical bureaus organized according to industry were the most valuable legacy of the war years; and former MITI Vice-Minister Kumagai Yoshifumi (196869) holds that industrial policy itself is synonymous with the industrial bureaus; without them a ministry would not be close enough to industry to exercise real guidance or control and could achieve no more than general economic policy.

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MITI's

History of Commercial and Industrial Policy

says that after the reform MCI had already become a ministry of munitions, although it did not receive that name officially for four more years.

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Murase abolished the Temporary Materials Coordination Bureau, the Commercial Affairs Bureau, the Control Bureau (successor after May 1, 1937, to the Temporary Industrial Rationality Bureau), and several other units. He combined their functions into one powerful coordinating and policy-making organization, the General Affairs Bureau (Somu* Kyoku), which is the origin of the contemporary MITI Secretariat. In addition, Murase took the specialized sections of the Industrial Affairs and Mining bureaus and made each of them into