MITI and the Japanese miracle

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seven private economic organizations, led by the Industrial Club, sent written statements of protest to the cabinet. The business community would tolerate self-regulation in order to expand production and further the war effort, but they wanted no part of the economic side of the New Order. The government and the business community deadlocked over the issue.

Between September 12 and October 22, 1940, MCI Minister Kobayashi was out of the country leading a delegation; it included Chairman Mukai Tadaharu of the Mitsui Trading Company and other business leaders and had gone to Batavia, Netherlands East Indies, to negotiate shipments of oil to Japan. The Japanese had been invited, by the major oil companies, with the full knowledge of their governments, in an attempt to appease Japan and stave off an attack on the N.E.I., which at the time seemed imminent.

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While Kobayashi was gone, Prime Minister Konoe ordered each ministry to draw up plans for the implementation of the Economic New Structure. At MCI Kishi was in charge, and in consultation with his old associate from Manchuria, President Hoshino of the CPB, he produced a draft that conformed closely to the September 13 CPB general plan.

When Kobayashi returned and saw Kishi's proposal, he denounced Kishi and his plan in a speech to the Industrial Club, calling the proposal a reflection of "red thinking," a fatal charge in the prevailing political climate. Others recalled Kishi's actions at the time of the protest over the pay cut a decade earlier and contended that he had always been "a little red."

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Unable to counter these charges, since he

was

advocating a Japanese version of national socialism, Kishi had to resign on January 4, 1941.

Kishi was only the biggest casualty of the businessmen's offensive. Beginning on January 17 and continuing through April 1941, the police took into custody some seventeen civilian officials of the CPB and charged them with violations of the Peace Preservation Law. All were held in prison for three years before being released on bail. Their trials were finally held during 1944 and 1945, and all but one were found not guilty. This so-called Cabinet Planning Board incident has never been fully explained. Some hold the view that it was a frame-up by the business community and that the police had no more evidence against those arrested than that they had been known to read works by Lenin and Kautsky and sing communist songs.

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One of the most important among those arrested, Inaba Hidezo* (then working in the materials mobilization planning unit), has two theories: the first is that the army on its own wanted to get rid of officials in the CPB who were accurately if pessimistically reporting to the cabinet that Japan