MITI and the Japanese miracle

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tioning of governmental officials called "munitions supervisors" in each factory and made these officials, rather than the industrywide control associations, responsible for seeing that targets were fulfilled and rules followed.

As it turned out, this law came too late to make much difference to the war effort. It merely added another layer of officialdom on top of the control associations, which still allocated materials and distributed products on an industrywide basis. The Munitions Companies Law was the last serious effort of the state-control group before the Allied occupation, and it remained a compromise; with the cabinet council looking on and the Diet increasingly dubious about Tojo's * leadership, Kishi could not go beyond the basic parameters of the capitalist system. The government continued to pay dividends to owners and guarantee their costs of production until June 1945, when the zaibatsu were only too happy to see the government buy out and nationalize their ruined munitions plants.

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The Munitions Companies Law was not an important precedent for postwar industrial policy (although the law of 1948 authorizing state control of the coal industry has strong similarities to it). The reorganization of the economic ministries, however, had lasting consequences. In essence the government abolished the Cabinet Planning Board and four old ministriesCommerce and Industry, Agriculture and Forestry, Communications, and Railroadsand replaced them with three new ministriesMunitions (Gunju-sho*), Agriculture and Commerce (Nosho-sho*), and Transport and Communications (Un'yu Tsushin-sho*). Concrete plans for this reorganization were drafted on the MCI side by Yamamoto Takayuki, the first MITI vice-minister in 1949; on the CPB side they were drafted by Tanaka Shin'ichi, deputy director of MITI's Enterprises Bureau after 1949, and Morisaki Hisatoshi, director of MITI's Heavy Industries Bureau in 1964.

The new Munitions Ministry (MM) was the brightest star in the firmament. The CPB and MCI's General Affairs Bureau were united into a single new agency for both planning and execution; it was called the General Mobilization Bureau (Sodoin* Kyoku), with Shiina Etsusaburo* as director. MCI's old bureaus for Steel, Machinery, Light Metals, Nonferrous Metals, Chemicals, and Fuel, plus the now defunct Communications Ministry's Electric Power Bureau, went to Munitions. MCI's old bureaus for Textiles, Daily Life Commodities, and Prices went to the new version of the old Ministry of Agriculture and Commerce. MCI's Enterprises Bureau continued on in MM as the Enterprises Readjustment Headquarters (Kigyo* Seibi Honbu), although it did not have many enterprises left to convert to war production. The few remaining