MITI and the Japanese miracle

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such old stalwarts from MCI, MM, and the Cabinet Planning Board as Uemura Kogoro *, Inaba Hidezo*, Kitano Shigeo, Inayama Yoshihiro, and several other former officials. The key subunit of the council, its Industrial Order Committee (Sangyo* Taisei Bukai), where Sahashi worked out his ideas for a new comprehensive control law, had only seven members. They included an ex-Agriculture bureaucrat, the president of the Development Bank, an

Asahi

editor, the executive director of Keidanren, the president of a private economic research institute, and a former MITI vice-minister (Tokunaga); the committee's chairman was the ubiquitous Arisawa Hiromi, the inventor of priority production during the occupation, a leader of the Industrial Rationalization Council, an authority on the coal industry, and MITI's most important academic adviser.

During July 1961 Sato* Eisaku succeeded Shiina Etsusaburo* as MITI minister, and Sahashi Shigeru succeeded Matsuo Kinzo* (who became vice-minister) as director of the Enterprises Bureau. When this occurred Imai Zen'ei was working in the difficult job of chief of the International Trade Bureau, where in conjunction with the MITI-controlled Coordination Bureau of the EPA he actually decided on the liberalization schedules for various industries. A year later, during July 1962, Imai was transferred to what was normally a preretirement position, director of the Patent Agency. Sahashi thus was left as the last major figure from the class of 1937 with an outstanding record in the mainstream of the ministry, industrial policy.

He still had one obstacle in his path to the vice-ministership, however. Matsuo Kinzo, the incumbent vice-minister, was from the class of 1934; but there were within the ministry two outstanding officials, one each from the classes of 1935 and 1936, who might be expected to take precedence over a member of the class of 1937. One of them, Koide Eiichi (1935), was out of the running because he was vice-minister of the EPA, the post that had been made a preretirement slot after the agency's economists' attempted coup. The other, Obori* Hiromu (1936), former chief of the Mining and Public Utilities bureaus and the current director of the Medium and Smaller Enterprises Agency, was Sahashi's problem. To get him out of the way, Matsuo and Sahashi suggested to Minister Sato that he appoint Obori as vice-minister of the EPA when Koide made his amakudari.

Despite protests from Koide, Obori himself, many other officials in the ministry, and even Chief Cabinet Secretary Ohira* Masayoshi (a future prime-minister and himself no stranger to bureaucratic infighting from his years in the Ministry of Finance), Sato went ahead with