MITI and the Japanese miracle

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paign against Sato *, claiming that he was attempting to revive Japanese militarism, and stating that they would not deal with him or anyone associated with him as Japanese prime minister.)

On October 15, 1971, Tanaka adroitly ended the textile dispute by giving the Nixon administration what it wanted while also coming up with a ¥200 billion "relief program" for the Japanese textile industry (including governmental purchase of surplus machines, compensation for losses in exports, and long-term low-interest loans for "production adjustment" and occupational change).

³²

Tanaka also offered the country new leadership on the overcrowding problem. Following the second Amaya thesis of 1969, the ministry had set some of its bright young officials to investigate the seriousness of that problem. They discovered that fully 73 percent of the nation's total industrial production was concentrated in a narrow belt along the east coast, and that some 33 million people lived within 30 miles of the three largest cities (Tokyo, Osaka, and Nagoya). This meant that 32 percent of the nation's population was living on 1 percent of the land area.

They also came up with such startling statistics as the fact that during rush hours Tokyo's traffic moved at only 5.6 miles per hour (2.5 m.p.h. along some routes), that the city had only 12 percent of its land area given over to roads (compared to 43 percent in Washington, D.C. or 23 percent in London), and that during the 1960's some 22 rural prefectures had suffered drastic declines in population (several communities in Tanaka's native Niigata prefecture were discovered to have all-female fire departments). To deal with these problems, MITI proposed a vast and very expensive program of industrial relocation, including building bullet-train networks all over the country, connecting Shikoku and Hokkaido to the main island through a system of monumental bridges and tunnels, and providing strong tax incentives to get industries to move out of the Tokyo-Kobe corridor.

The official in charge of these plans was Konaga Keiichi, who from October 1969 to July 1971 was chief of the Industrial Location Guidance Section in the Enterprises Bureau. When Tanaka became MITI minister in July 1971, he appointed Konaga his personal secretary, and Konaga was the ghost writer for Tanaka's best-selling book

Nihon

retto

*

kaizo

*

ron

(A plan to remodel the Japanese archipelago).

³³

The book was published in June 1972, just a month before the LDP convention at which Tanaka planned to contest the party presidency (and, thus, the prime ministership) with Fukuda Takeo. A rewritten and spruced up version of MITI's original plan, it sold more than a million copies and helped ensure Tanaka's victory. On July 7, 1972, Tanaka moved from MITI to the prime minister's office, and he named