MITI and the Japanese miracle

Page 285

The Nixon administration, elected in 1968, was publicly committed to obtaining limitations on Japanese exports of synthetic textiles to America, just as the Kennedy administration had earlier negotiated an "orderly marketing agreement" covering cotton textiles. Both administrations were responding to political demands from the American Textile Manufacturers Institute, who used the potent argument that imports were putting many of the blacks among their employees out of work. (It should be noted that Japan has consistently and successfully prohibited imports of leather goods on the grounds that these would compete with the domestic industries of the

burakumin

, a dispossessed minority in Japanese society.)

Nixon thought he could arrange a quid pro quo since Prime Minister Sato * had made a major political issue out of the return of Okinawa. At the Sato-Nixon* summit conference in Washington (November 1920, 1969) Nixon agreed to the precise terms Sato wanted for the return of Okinawa (without nuclear weapons), in return for which he thought he had received a promise from Sato to bring synthetic textile exports under control. The Japanese press also thought so, since it invented the slogan

ito o utte, nawa o katta

("selling thread to buy rope," meaning "trading textiles for Oki

nawa

") to characterize Sato's* diplomacy toward the United States.

¹⁶

Sato, as it turned out, could not deliver on his promise because of obstruction by both the textile industry and MITI. From September 15 to 19, 1969, a MITI on-site inspection team had toured the United States to determine the extent, if any, of damage to domestic spinners and weavers from Japanese imports. Led by Takahashi Shukuro*, the chief of MITI's Textiles Bureau, and composed of the chiefs of the First Market Section, the Fibers and Spinning Section, the Textiles Export Section, and other officials, this mission concluded that the American textile industry was thriving and that the damage caused by imports was nil. For all practical purposes this remained the Japanese position for the next two yearsthrough what was to become one of the most unproductive interactions between two allies in the postwar world, what Maeda Yasuyuki would later characterize as the "quagmire negotiations."

¹⁷

The textile dispute between Japan and the United States was only the most public and the noisiest of several economic clashes. Many of the other disputes, like that concerning textiles, also seemed to focus on MITI as the culprit. For example, following capital liberalization, MITI received a proposal from the Texas Instruments Company, which wanted to open a wholly owned subsidiary in Japan to man-