MITI and the Japanese miracle

Page 243

contributed to his growing self-confidence. He completed his military service and returned to MCI during the same month that Kishi took over as minister (October 1941). He notes in his autobiography that during his absence the ministry had been completely transformed: the old Industrial Affairs Bureau he had joined in 1937 had been replaced by half-a-dozen industry-specific vertical bureaus, each of them devoted to fostering and controlling its industry for war production. He worked throughout the war in various MCI and Munitions Ministry bureaus until November 1946, when he received his first appointment as a section chief (see Appendix C).

Sahashi Shigeru was destined to become the best-known and certainly the most controversial of MITI's vice-ministers. His background, outlook, and personality all contributed to his reputation as an "exceptional bureaucrat" (

ishoku

kanryo

*), a "samurai among samurai," an "official who uses force" (

gebaruto kanryo

), the "monster Sahashi" (

kaijin Sachan

) in the press's amused term, the undisputed leader of the ''nationalist faction" within MITI, and, in Suzuki Yukio's words, the leading "industrial nationalist" of his time.

²

As chief of the Enterprises Bureau and later as vice-minister, he presided over the ministry's initial response to economic liberalization, and his policies laid the groundwork for the extremely rapid industrial growth of the late 1960's. Through his actions and his strongly enunciated opinions he set off a series of explosions that sent shock waves not only through the worlds of bureaucracy, industry, and finance, but also through the world of politics. His career offers what is probably the best Japanese example of the inseparability of bureaucratic interests and substantive issues of policy when the state dominates administration of the economy.

As one measure of his influence, Sahashi and his era have been made the subjects of at least three popular novelsone of which (by Shiroyama Saburo*) Sahashi liked and one of which (by Akaboshi Jun, the pseudonym of Nawa Taro* of the

Asahi shimbun

) deeply irritated him; all of them reflect the public's fascination with his spirited, "high posture" defense of MITI's handling of the economy. Among his many achievements, intentional and inadvertent, he institutionalized "administrative guidance" (

gyosei

*

shido

*) as MITI's main means of implementing industrial policy after it lost its control over foreign exchange; and the internationalization of the ministry that followed in the wake of his vice-ministership was as much a reaction to him personally as to the policies he espoused.

^*

^*

The novels are Shiroyama's

Kanryo-tachi

*

no natsu

(The summer of the bureaucrats; 1975), Akaboshi's

Shosetsu

*

Tsusan-sho

* (A MITI novel; 1971), and Akimoto Hideo's work

(footnote continued on next page)