MITI and the Japanese miracle

Page 35

Two

The Economic Bureaucracy

When the analyst discovers in the course of political research a persistent discrepancy between the stated principles and actual practices of a society, he has a strong impulse to ring the critical alarm bells to warn of a lack of legitimacy, of the operation of covert powers, or of simple hypocrisy. The end product is usually a muckraking or critical book, and the subject of Japanese politics has produced a plethora of them, by both Japanese and foreigners. I myself shall add a few items to the list of anomalies in Japanese bureaucratic life, but my purpose is not criticism. Instead, I am concerned to explain why the discrepancy between the formal authority of either the Emperor (prewar) or the Diet (postwar) and the actual powers of the state bureaucracy exists and persists, and why this discrepancy contributes to the success of the developmental state.

Japan has long displayed a marked separation in its political system between reigning and ruling, between the powers of the legislative branch and the executive branch, between the majority party and the mandarinateand, in the last analysis, between authority and power. As a result, a discrepancy exists between the constitutional and the actual locus of sovereignty that is so marked the Japanese themselves have invented terms to discuss it

omote

(outer, in plain view) and

ura

(inner, hidden from sight), or

tatemae

(principle; Edward Seidensticker once proposed the word should be translated "pretense") and

honne

(actual practice).

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Japanese and foreign observers are aware that the discrepancy generates a degree of hypocrisy or euphemism, and they often enjoy criticizing this hypocrisy. Kakuma Takashi, for example, argues that in the postwar world the business community likes to pretend that it is