MITI and the Japanese miracle

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ters, there is direct continuity between prewar and postwar officials in this particular branch of the Japanese state bureaucracy; the postwar purge touched it hardly at all. The last vice-minister during the period of this study, Komatsu Yugoro *, who held the office from November 1974 to July 1976, entered the ministry in the class of 1944. All postwar vice-ministers previous to him came from earlier classes, going back to the first postwar vice-minister, Shiina Etsusaburo* of the class of 1923. Wada Toshinobu, who became vice-minister in 1976, was the first without any experience of the Ministry of Munitions era.

Nakamura Takafusa locates the "roots" of both industrial policy and administrative guidance in the controlled economy of the 1930's, and he calls MITI the "reincarnation" of the wartime MCI and MM.

⁷¹

Arisawa Hiromi says that the prosperity of the 1970's was a product of the "control era," and no less a figure than Shiina Etsusaburo, former vice-minister, twice MITI minister, and vice-president of the Liberal Democratic Party, credits the experiences of old trade-and-industry bureaucrats in Manchuria in the 1930's, his own and Kishi Nobusuke's included.

⁷²

Tanaka Shin'ichiwho was one of the leading officials of the Cabinet Planning Board (Kikaku-in) before it was merged with MCI to form the MM, and who became a postwar MITI officialargues that wartime planning was the basis for the work of the postwar Economic Stabilization Board (Keizai Antei Honbu) and MCI.

⁷³

And Maeda Yasuyuki, one of Japan's leading scholars of MITI, writes that "the heritage of the wartime economy is that it was the first attempt at heavy and chemical industrialization; more important, the war provided the 'how' for the 'what' in the sense of innumerable 'policy tools' and accumulated 'know-how.'"

⁷⁴

Even more arresting than these comments from participants and analysts is the fact that the Japanese economy began to change in quite decisive ways around 1930. It is true that industrial policy in one form or another goes back to the Meiji era, but it is also true that after the turn of the century the government moved progressively away from its former policies of interference in the domestic economy (if not in those of the colonies or dependencies), and that for about thirty years an approximation of laissez faire was in vogue. Rodney Clark's observation is startling but true: "The organization of Japanese and Western industry was probably more similar in 1910 than in 1970."

⁷⁵

MITI and modern Japanese industrial policy are genuine children of the Showa* era (1926-), and the present study is for that reason virtually coterminous with the reign of Emperor Hirohito. To carry the