MITI and the Japanese miracle

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held all the basic patents on computer technology, which effectively blocked the development of a Japanese computer industry.

Sahashi wanted IBM's patents and made no bones about it. In as forthright a manner as possible, he made his position clear to IBM-Japan: "We will take every measure possible to obstruct the success of your business unless you license IBM patents to Japanese firms and charge them no more than a 5 percent royalty."

⁶

In one of his negotiating sessions, Sahashi proudly recalls, he said that "we do not have an inferiority complex toward you; we only need time and money to compete effectively."

⁷

IBM ultimately had to come to terms. It sold its patents and accepted MITI's administrative guidance over the number of computers it could market domestically as conditions for manufacturing in Japan. Since IBM leased its machines rather than selling them outright, in 1961 Sahashi responded by setting up a semiofficial Japan Electronic Computer Company, financed by the Development Bank, to buy hardware from domestic producers and lease it to customers. To ensure MITI's control, he appointed the old MCI senior, Murase Naokai, president of the leasing company.

Sahashi's vigorous industrial xenophobia made him quite popular with many industrialists, but in another realm of his official activitiesrelations with the political worldhe was not nearly so clever or perceptive an operator as he had been vis-à-vis IBM. Ever since the creation in 1955 of the Liberal Democratic Party, politicians slowly had been rising in power as rivals to the bureaucrats, although the bureaucrats were not fully attuned to what was happening. First the military bureaucrats and then the economic bureaucrats had dominated Japanese government from 1932 to at least 1955. From around 1960, however, a milieu comparable to the one that Yoshino Shinji had worked in during the 1920's began to reappear; the new politicians were much more dependent on the bureaucracy than they had been in the earlier period, but on the other hand they had much stronger constitutional powers than before. The bureaucrats were lulled because after Ishibashi's untimely resignation in 1957 because of illness, his successors as prime minister had all been famous ex-bureaucratsKishi, Ikeda, and Sato*.

^*

However, even Ikeda and Sato had to pay attention to the political process; they were not merely for-

^*

Some Japanese political analysts lament the control from 1957 to 1972 of the prime ministership by former bureaucrats. They comment rather wanly that if only Ishibashi had worn an overcoat on the February day in 1957 when he attended an outdoor celebration at his alma mater, Waseda University, the political history of postwar Japan might have been quite different. See

Yomiuri shimbun

, Political Department,

Sori

*

daijin

(The prime minister), rev. ed. (Tokyo: Yomiuri Shimbun Sha, 1972), p. 80.