MITI and the Japanese miracle

Page 185

cial price of rice, and he predicted that by November 1947 a family should be able to survive on it without going into debt or resorting to the black market. As it turned out, inflation persisted and Wada was ruined when, on October 11, 1947, the press made a sensation out of the discovery that a judge of the Tokyo District Court, Yamaguchi Yoshitada, had starved to death while trying to live on the official ration. Judge Yamaguchi left a diary stating that "even bad laws are the law, and I am pledged to defend the law." He had refused to buy black market rice.

⁴⁹

However, the longer-range consequence of Wada's abortive attempt to control inflation was a much greater degree of agreement among economic planners that priority production had to be wedded in some way to control of the sources of inflation.

The second important but unsuccessful Katayama initiative was a proposal to nationalize the coal industry, an idea borrowed from the British Labour Party's policies of September 1946. Hirai Tomisaburo* of MCI enthusiastically drafted a state control law for the government, but it met with intense hostility in the Diet, despite MacArthur's endorsement of the plan. Mizutani Chozaburo*, MCI minister in the socialist cabinet, attempted to gain publicity for the measure by having himself photographed in a coal mine wielding a pickax and wearing only a loincloth, and he was thereafter always known as the "loincloth minister" (

fundoshi daijin

). After innumerable disruptions and fist fights in the Diet, the heavily modified Law for the Temporary State Management of the Coal Industry (Rinji Sekitan Kogyo* Kanri Ho*, number 209 of December 20, 1947, implemented on April 1, 1948) came into being. It had a three-year time limit and covered some 56 ex-zaibatsu mines. Its only concrete result was to cause a reorganization and vast expansion of the Coal Agency, which by 1950 employed some 12,000 officials. The law did not, however, serve to increase coal production beyond what the priority production system had already achieved, and it was abrogated prematurely on May 2, 1950, unlamented as the last formal effort of MCI or MITI to separate management from ownership and turn management over to the state.

⁵⁰

There can be no question that priority production achieved results. Coal production for 1947 was 29.3 million tons, or 97.7 percent of the target of 30 million tons, and production was raised during 1948 to 34,790,000 tons, or about 60 percent of the highest levels ever before achieved. The increased availability of raw materials and energy influenced all other designated industries. The ESB defended priority production in its first

Economic White Paper

(July 22, 1947) with the theory that "a twofold increase in coal production leads to a fourfold increase in general manufacturing." Kudo* Shoshiro*, deputy chairman of the