MITI and the Japanese miracle

Page 175

had made a vital contribution to Japan's postwar economic recovery. . . . He was in charge of occupation policy toward Japanese banking from 1945 to 1948. . . . Many financial leaders, including [then] Deputy Prime Minister Fukuda Takeo, credit him with preventing the breakup of Japanese banks and insurance companies in the postwar dismemberment of zaibatsu companies in Japan.''

³²

Without wishing to detract from Beplat's award in any manner, one may suggest that from the Japanese, and especially from MCI's point of view, there was a degree of

menju

*

fukuhai

(following a superior's orders to his face while reversing them in the belly) at work during those immediate postwar years.

Sometimes Japanese officials genuinely did not understand what SCAP wanted them to do. For example, with regard to the Antimonopoly Law (number 54 of April 14, 1947), Morozumi Yoshihiko, who 25 years later became vice-minister of MITI, recalls his painful efforts during the occupation to translate article by article into legal Japanese the draft of the Antimonopoly Law that General MacArthur's headquarters had sent over to MCI for enactment. "It seems laughable today," he writes, "but then we didn't really know what they were talking about."

³³

When Morozumi showed his draft to his "senior," Murase Naokai, then chief of the Cabinet Legislation Bureau, Murase asked him what something he had translated meant and he was forced, much to his embarrassment, to reply that he did not know. Murase got the drift of the law only by looking at the original English text. Needless to say, the Antimonopoly Law was not something the Japanese were able to avoid or evade. As we shall see in the next two chapters, MITI spent the succeeding 30 years struggling to get around Morozumi's handiwork. The tension that developed between MITI on the one hand and the Fair Trade Commission (created by the law) on the other undoubtedly made a contribution to the favorable climate in which high-speed growth took place. This tension, unintended by either SCAP or MCI, may have been one of the occupation's greatest contributions to the economic "miracle."

Although SCAP's accounts are virtually silent on the subject, the Japanese characterize the first four years of the occupation by reference to two great debates over Japan's economic reconstruction and by one overwhelming factthe rise of the state as the central actor in the economy. The first of the two controversies was over whether reconstruction should give priority to expanding production (the

seisan

fukko

*

setsu

, or the theory of reconstruction through production) or to price stabilization and control of inflation (the

tsuka

*

kaikaku setsu

, or the theory of currency reform).

³⁴

The second controversy concerned