MITI and the Japanese miracle

Page 174

hampered by its lack of knowledge of the people it had come to govern, and even more so, perhaps, by its generally happy ignorance of the amount of requisite knowledge it lacked.

^*

Thus SCAP would sometimes approve of MCI proposals that the Americans thought were temporary expedients but that ended up lasting until well into the 1960's (foreign exchange budgets, for example). As for SCAP's policies calling for zaibatsu dissolution, the officials of MCI's old Enterprises Bureaunow called the Readjustment Department (Seiri Bu)administered this program with enthusiasm. But when it came to economic deconcentration generally, toward which the breakup of the zaibatsu was only a means and not an end, the industrial bureaucrats quickly discovered that there were divisions within SCAP and took advantage of them. Eleanor Hadley, herself a SCAP trustbuster, explains:

Inasmuch as in the United States commercial banks are not permitted to have industrial and trading subsidiaries or affiliates, the American vocabulary and way of thinking is to regard commercial banking as quite separate from industry and commerce. . . . The Economic and Scientific Section of [SCAP] Headquarters . . . was set up with an Antitrust and Cartel Division and a Finance Division, which was a mistake. . . . The result of the actual arrangement was that the Antitrust and Cartel Division claimed jurisdiction in antitrust matters over the banks, but the staff of the Finance Division insisted that the banks were entirely theirs (and their responsibility included no antitrust assignment!).

³¹

After the occupation the old zaibatsu were recreated on the basis of their banks rather than their former family holding companies. This was a much more rational and effective arrangement, but it is certain that this was not exactly what SCAP had in mind. In fact, in 1975, with no apparent sense of irony, the Japanese government awarded its Second Class Order of the Sacred Treasure to Tristan E. Beplat, who had recently retired as a senior vice-president of the Manufacturers Hanover Trust Company of New York. As the

Japan Times

explained, Beplat was "an American banker who the government said

^*

See

The Yoshida Memoirs

, p. 128. However, Yoshida himself was not above attempting to fool SCAP officials. "The original GHQ plan, as handed to us," Yoshida writes, "called for the purging of 'standing directors' as well as others occupying top positions. This was translated into Japanese by our side as 'managing directors.' Strictly speaking, however, a 'standing director' could be interpreted as one who functioned regularly in a company, which would have included most ordinary directors. We held to our interpretation that 'standing directors' were, in fact, managing directors, and by so doing were able to save many ordinary directors who might otherwise have been so classified from the purge. Which shows that upon occasion mistranslations serve their turn."

Ibid.

, pp. 15556. The issue here is the translation of the difficult terms

senmu torishimariyaku

(executive director),

jomu

*

torishimariyaku

(managing director), and

torishimariyaku

(director).

³⁰