MITI and the Japanese miracle

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the course of the Showa * era, economic priorities have always been at or near the top of the state's agenda, and this is a constant that is unlikely to change.

Perhaps surprisingly, in light of the determined efforts of the American occupiers to change Japanese economic institutions, a considerable degree of continuity also exists throughout the Showa era in the means adopted by the state to achieve economic development. The great discontinuity is of course in the discredited reliance on military force to achieve economic security via imperialism. This failed so disastrously that after 1945 it was totally repudiated. But this does not mean that the strictly economic development policies attempted during the militarist era were or should have been repudiated. Instead of being rejected, they came to form a repertoire of policy tools that could be used again after peace and independence had been attained. There is actually nothing surprising about this: just as the activism of the postwar American state had its roots in the New Deal and just as the totalism of the postwar Soviet state had its roots in the Stalinism of the First Five Year Plan, so the developmentalism of the postwar Japanese state had its roots in the economic initiatives of the 1930's. In this sense the experience of the 1930's and the 1940's was not by any means totally negative for postwar Japan; these were the years in which the managerial tools of the developmental state were first tested, some being rejected and others proving useful. Overcoming the depression required economic development, war preparation and war fighting required economic development, postwar reconstruction required economic development, and independence from U.S. aid required economic development. The means to achieve development for one cause ultimately proved to be equally good for the other causes.

There are striking continuities among the state's various policy tools over the prewar and postwar years. Yoshino and Kishi discovered industrial rationalization during the late 1920's as a means to overcome the recession; their protégés Yamamoto, Tamaki, Hirai, Ishihara, Ueno, Tokunaga, Matsuo, Imai, and Sahashi applied it again during the 1950's and 1960's to achieve modern, competitive enterprises. During both periods the state attempted to replace competition with cooperation, while not totally losing the benefits of competition. Governmental control over the convertibility of currency lasted uninterruptedly from 1933 to 1964, and persisted even after that time in attenuated forms. The Petroleum Industry Law of 1934 is the precise model for the Petroleum Industry Law of 1962. The plans and planning style of the Cabinet Planning Board were carried over to the