MITI and the Japanese miracle

Page 258

nance Section and a protégé of Sahashi's; and two younger officers, Konaga Keiichi (who later served as Prime Minister Tanaka's assistant and was the actual author of Tanaka's

Plan for the Reform of the Japanese Archipelago

) and Uchida Genko * (an engineer who had played an active role in fostering the automobile industry).

²³

The Enterprises Bureau first entitled its brainchild the Draft Law of Special Measures for Strengthening the International Competitive Ability of Designated Industries. It was the cabinet that changed its name. Article 1 spelled out the law's objectives: to promote the sound development of the national economy by raising the international competitive ability of designated industries in order to counter the effects of liberalization. Article 2 designated the first three industriesspecial steels, automobiles, and petrochemicalsand authorized the designation of others by cabinet order after consultation with the Industrial Structure Investigation Council. Articles 3 and 4 incorporated the public-private cooperation formula, which Sahashi held to be the very heart of the whole law.

²⁴

These articles authorized three-way committees (

kondankai

), composed of representatives of government, industry, and finance, which were to establish and carry out "promotion standards" for each particular industry. It is perhaps worth noting that the Japanese word kondankai (discussion group, or committee) implies more than its English equivalents.

Kenkyusha's

*

New Japanese-English Dictionary

(4th ed.) gives for kondankai the Italian word

conversazione

, "a verbal agreement between two or more parties," which suggests something less than a contract but considerably more than a "conversation."

Articles 5 and 6 required managers of designated industries to cooperate in raising the competitive ability of their firms, said that banks had to "give heed to" loan requests from designated industries, and ordered government banks to assist them. Articles 7 and 8 provided for "structural financing" for designated industries, various tax exemptions to be specified by cabinet orders, and reductions in the corporate income tax. Article 9 legalized "cooperative behavior" by enterprises in a designated industry and specifically exempted such behavior from the purview of the Antimonopoly Law. Articles 10, 11, 12, and 13 were given over to legal technicalities. Like most Japanese statutes, the Special Measures Law was comparatively short.

²⁵

Disclosure of the contents of the law in the Industrial Structure Investigation Council immediately set off three major controversies. The first was the old favorite of self-coordination versus public-private cooperation. Much in the tradition of Kobayashi Ichizo* at the time of Prince Konoe's New Structure Movement, Ishizaka Taizo*, the