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subsidies and governmental pressure, the depressed medium and smaller enterprises could be shifted to production of munitions, production for export, or production of import substitutes. Officials of the department also used techniques learned in the rationalization movement to promote joint management and enterprise mergers for large numbers of firms. The workers who could not be easily reorganized were encouraged and paid to emigrate to Manchuria and China. The Unemployment Policy Department of the new Welfare Ministry also sponsored such emigration in order to help prevent social unrest among the unemployed.
In the reorganization of MCI on June 16, 1939, the Industrial Conversion Policy Department was renamed and continued as the Promotion Department (Shinko * Bu). It is not clear who thought of the term ''promotion" or what was meant by it, but the "promotion department" was perpetuated in the MITI era as a component of the Medium and Smaller Enterprises Agency, created on August 2, 1948. MITI historians see in the reorganization of 1939 a fundamental change of function for the ministry; until then commercial and industrial policy had been carried out without reference to the scale of enterprises, but after 1939 policy was explicitly committed to the nurturing of largescale enterprises.
5
This function seems to underlie the meaning of "promotion"namely, the promotion of the expansion of small businesses into larger ones.
The movement to convert small businesses to a war footing began slowly during late 1938 as an ad hoc response to the stretching out of the China Incident. The government did not agree on a basic policy for the Promotion Department until January 12, 1941, when MCI announced its "General Plan for the Conversion and Closing of Medium and Smaller Enterprises." Two years later the government would need to apply the policy to all enterprises, not just medium and smaller firms.
The first half of 1942 was a period of great euphoria for Japan's industrial planners. The 1942 materials mobilization plan was the most optimistic of all of them, and the Cabinet Planning Board even relaxed regulations over the use of petroleum, now that Dutch East Indies supplies were in Japanese hands. Shortly after the fall of Singapore the military expressed its appreciation to the economic bureaucrats for their efforts by supplying the CPB and MCI with large numbers of commemorative rubber balls made of Malayan rubber for distribution to the
shokoumin
* (children of the rising generation).
6
Kishi Nobusuke, at age 46 the youngest minister in Japan's modern history, was