MITI and the Japanese miracle

Page 158

so heartily disliked by the public that after the war even the phrase was dropped from the lexicon of trade and industry bureaucrats, although they of course invented new euphemisms for the same thing. The wartime shift of industrial structure was emphatically not a byproduct of the working of market forces but was, instead, the invention and the responsibility of MCI. The ministry's pursuit of enterprise readjustment led in 1942 to the creation of the Enterprises Bureau (Kigyo * Kyoku), which still exists today under the title of Industrial Policy Bureau, to be the control center for both the ministry and the Japanese industrial world.

Writing at the end of the war, Jerome B. Cohen concluded, "All the evidence indicates . . . that the major [Japanese] reliance for the war-time economic effort, as it was conceived at the outbreak of war, was to be placed upon a further shift in resources from nonwar to war uses rather than upon a lifting of the whole level of output."

¹

Similarly, the authors of MITI's authoritative

History of Commercial and Industrial Policy

comment that the second Productivity Expansion Plan, written by the CPB and approved by the cabinet on May 8, 1942, was

TABLE

10

The Top Ten Japanese Mining and Manufacturing Corporations, 19291972

Name

^a

Total capital in yen

Remarks

I. 1929

(Thousands)

1. Kawasaki Shipbuilding (14)

239,848

Est. 1896. Today Kawasaki Heavy Industries.

2. Fuji Paper ()

159,642

Est. 1887. Merged with Oji* Paper

1933.

3. Oji Paper

154,228

Est. 1873. Today Jujo* Paper (63), Oji Paper (69), and Honshu* Paper (88).

4. Kanegafuchi Textiles (47)

145,989

Est. 1887. Today Kanebo*, Ltd.

5. Karafuto Industries ()

117,353

Est. 1913. Merged with Oji Paper

1933.

6. Dai Nippon Textiles (55)

116,398

Est. 1889. Today Unitika, Ltd.

7. Mitsubishi Shipbuilding (2)

112,341

Est. 1917. Today Mitsubishi Heavy Industries.

8. Mitsui Mining (74)

111,827

Est. 1911. Today Mitsui Mining and Mitsui Metal Industries.

9. Toyo* Textiles (48)

111,490

Est. 1914. Today Toyobo*, Ltd.

10. Taiwan Sugar ()

109,539

Est. 1900.

(table continued on next page)