MITI and the Japanese miracle

Page 270

Keizai Doyukai *. He had no difficulty whatsoever in controlling his enthusiasm for MITI's intervention in the steel industry, which he believed had always favored Yawata and Fuji.

On November 18, 1965, after Hyuga's* initial opposition, MITI Minister Mikihimself an LDP faction leader, holder of the record as the longest continuously elected member of the Diet, and a future prime ministergot on the telephone and, according to Hyuga*, promised that if Sumitomo would go along with the production cut through at least the third quarter, he would act favorably on Sumitomo's investment plans for its big Wakayama steel works (the company intended to add a fourth blast furnace and a fourth and fifth rotary furnace, or converter). Sahashi had not been directly involved in this dispute until Hyuga's defiance of MITI, and both he and Miki are vague on whether they consulted each other before Miki's call.

^*

However, on November 19, the day after Miki's call, Sahashi also contacted Hyuga and told him that unless Sumitomo backed down, he would use the Import Control Ordinance (Yu'nyu* Boeki* Kanri Rei, cabinet order 414 of 1949) to restrict imports of coking coal for the company to precisely the amount necessary to produce its authorized quota and not a shovelful more. Sahashi here revealed MITI's most authoritarian side, and when the whole matter became public, the press generally backed Sumitomo as the underdog. Hyuga held a press conference in Osaka where he said that since it was his company that was spending the money and taking the risks, he did not see that it was any concern of the government how much the company produced. (This was, of course, not entirely candid, since Sumitomo had profited as much as any other company from government-backed financing and government-guaranteed loans from the World Bank.) More pointedly, however, Hyuga added that MITI favored firms that had ex-MITI bureaucrats working for them, and that it appeared to him as if Vice-Minister Sahashi had overruled Minister Miki. "Which one of them is the minister?" he asked the gathered Osaka reporters. This was promptly transformed by the national press into big headlines

SAHASHI, MINISTER; MIKI, VICE-MINISTER

that stuck in the public mind as a slogan. (This case is similar to the

^*

According to Sahashi, Miki's telephone call was merely a matter of courtesy from a senior politician to an influential constituent. His "promise" was extremely vaguean example of what is called

kancho

*

yogo

*.(literally, "official jargon," but meaning a government official's saying yes to a citizen's request as a matter of politeness but with the implication that the official has no intention of doing anything about the request). Hyuga, in Sahashi's view, deliberately misunderstood Miki's meaning. See Matsubayashi Matsuo, ed.,

Kaikoroku, sengo

Tsusan

*

seisaku shi

(Memoirs: postwar MITI policies; Tokyo: Seisaku Jiho* Sha, 1973), p. 141.