MITI and the Japanese miracle

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and Hizume Nobuaki (who was later executive director of Daimaru Department Stores). Their chief policy-making organization was the Industrial Rationalization Council. Composed originally of 45 committees and 81 subcommittees covering every industry in the country and bringing together several hundred business executives and academic specialists centered around Ishikawa Ichiro * of Keidanren and Arisawa Hiromi of Todai*, it was the main means of liaison between the government and the business community. Its committees went over and modified government proposals ranging from the rationalization of the steel industry to the possibilities of earning foreign exchange through the export of Japanese motion pictures.

³⁶

Perhaps the council's least known but later most applauded activities were in the areas of the reform of management, the institutionalization of the lifetime employment system, and the raising of the productivity of the Japanese industrial worker. Noda Nobuo, a former Mitsubishi executive and chairman of the council's Management Committee, has always contended that the committee got its ideas for quality control and the measurement of productivity from the United Stateseven though, ironically, during the 1970's the Japanese began to export some of these same ideas back to the United States.

³⁷

The Management Committee borrowed speakers on industrial management from SCAP and the U.S. Air Force, many of whom it sent around the country to lecture to managers and newspaper reporters; and it was so impressed by the ideas concerning statistics and industrial engineering of the American professor W. E. Deming that it named a prize after him. The "Deming Prize" for quality control, established by the Union of Japanese Scientists and Engineers and the newspaper

Nihon keizai

, was first awarded in 1951 to the Showa* Denko* Company, Yawata Steel, and Tanabe Pharmaceuticals. Deming became a popular lecturer for his close friend Ishikawa Ichiro, who was then president of Keidanren, head of the Industrial Rationalization Council, chairman of the Showa Denko Company, and a champion of industrial standards and the certification of products by independent testing institutions.

³⁸

Excited by the American concept of "scientific management," the Industrial Rationalization Council churned out publications and sponsored speakers, leading during the mid-1950's to what was called the "business administration boom" (

keiei

bumu

*) and to making bestsellers of books such as Peter F. Drucker's

The Practice of Management

(published in 1954 and translated into Japanese in 1956). Equally significant (particularly for those who contend that the contemporary