MITI and the Japanese miracle

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the person of Sakon Tomosaburo *, chief of the Steel Industry Section in MITI's Heavy Industries Bureau, who made the unfortunate public comment that in this court the "laymen are judging the professionals." The press covered the hearings extensively. On October 30, 1969, the court finally ruled that the merger could proceed only if Fuji sold one of its plants to Nippon Kokan* and Yawata turned over one of its installations to Kobe Steel. Both companies reluctantly complied, and New Japan Steel, the world's largest steel company, formally came into being on March 31, 1970. Three years later, on May 30, 1973, former MITI Vice-Minister Hirai Tomisaburo*, who had retired in 1955 and entered Yawata, became president of the country's largest enterprise. Although Hirai was widely respected as a leader of the steel industry, this elevation of a former bureaucrat to the top position of a company long associated with the government led some to see a trend toward excessive bureaucratic influence in the economy.

¹²

MITI, of course, was totally identified with the steel merger, if for no other reason than that the chief executives of the new company, including Ojima Arakazu, Inayama Yoshihiro, Hirai Tomisaburo, and Tokunaga Hisatsugu, were all former MCI or MITI officials. Because of this and several other issues that came to a head at precisely the same time that the steel case ended up in court, MITI was subjected to some of the most withering criticism it had ever endured in its long history. The contemporaneous foreign criticism of the ministryJames Abegglen's term "Japan, Inc." and the London

Economist

's references to "notorious MITI"never fazed MITI officials, but domestic criticism was taken seriously. The main issues raised by domestic critics, in addition to the steel merger, were environmental damage, overcrowding, alleged collusion with big business, and a host of other side effects of high-speed growth that the public demanded be addressed. And as if this were not enough, right in the midst of all these problems the ministry experienced the most serious revolt ever against its administrative guidance, a blow that signified a genuine turning point in its relations with big business.

The issue of industrial pollution and environmental damage had numerous facets. At its worst it referred to the appearance of the Minamata and

itai-itai

"diseases," caused respectively by mercury poisoning of the waters around Minamata village in Kumamoto prefecture by the Chisso Fertilizer Company and cadmium poisoning in Toyama prefecture and other locations. (In September 1969 the chief of the Tokyo Mine Safety Office, a division of MITI, committed suicide when cadmium contamination was confirmed in Gunma prefecture.)

¹³

Only slightly less serious was the so-called Yokkaichi asthma