MITI and the Japanese miracle

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power decisively away from the zaibatsu and in favor of the bureaucrats. Just as World War I had led European nations to assign to the state new tasks of economic mobilization and developmentand to remove these tasks from the agendas of parliamentsso the crises and wars of the 1930's led to the same thing in Japan. But it took the catastrophe of the Pacific War to supply the political prerequisites of the developmental state. By the 1950's Takahashi Korekiyo's observation that "it is much harder to nullify the results of an economic conquest than those of a military conquest" had become not uncommon wisdom but simple common sense.