MITI and the Japanese miracle

Page 167

Yuki * Toyotaro*, president of the Bank of Japan and affiliated with the Yasuda zaibatsu; Goko* Kiyoshi, former president of Mitsubishi Heavy Industries; Yamashita Kamesaburo*, former president of the Yamashita Steamship Company; and Suzuki Chuji*, president of the Showa* Denko* Company and president of the Light Metals Industry Control Association.

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Although these men were attached to the cabinet primarily to look after zaibatsu interests, they were quickly educated by Kishi about the problems of the control associations. One sample of Kishi's position is available from a Tokyo radio broadcast of June 23, 1943:

At a time when the readjustment of industries is being carried out on a large scale, there are still entrepreneurs living on their unearned incomes. Concerning this, the minister of commerce and industry, Kishi, . . . emphasized the necessity of maintaining a strict control over various industries, causing a profound sensation among the leaders of industrial circles. . . . The minister of commerce and industry has been kept busy preparing a concrete plan in order to make the control companies function as national policy companies. . . . The directors of the companies, although they are regarded as the responsible authorities, are still remaining as they were before.

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Of all the members of the council, the one Kishi feared and resented mostbecause of his long association with MCI and his insider's knowledgewas Fujihara. In fact, on November 17, 1943, after the founding of the Munitions Ministry on November 1, Fujihara was secretly appointed a state minister without portfoliothe same rank as Kishiand placed within the ministry to oversee his activities. Nonetheless, the evidence indicates that Fujihara was every bit as alarmed as Kishi by the ineffectiveness of the control associations at a time when the war was entering its most dangerous phase for Japan. After several inspection trips Fujihara reported to the council that there was no real shortage of coal, only inefficiency and negligence by the mine operators, and that aircraft production was stymied not by a shortage of aluminumonly 55 percent of the aluminum available was being used for airplanesbut by the intense competition for and hoarding of materials by the army and navy.

¹⁹

Kishi devised two answers to these various problems: the enactment of a new law to enhance governmental supervision over the control associations, and a total reorganization of the government's economic bureaucracies. On October 31, 1943, an extraordinary session of the Diet passed the Munitions Companies Law (Gunju Kaisha Ho*, number 108), which sought to establish once and for all the principle contained in the old Konoe New Structure Movement of 1940namely, the separation of management from ownership. It authorized the sta-