MITI and the Japanese miracle

Page 36

"yielding under protest" to the powers of MITI when it is actually doing nothing more than pursuing its traditional relationship with the bureaucracy.

²

Goshi* Kohei* is irritated by the senior business leaders who refer their decisions for approval to government section chiefs often not much older than their own grandchildren and then speak ill of them back at the Industrial Club.

³

Obayashi Kenji believes that the numerous "deliberation councils" (what Berger calls "policy councils," or

shingikai

), in which officials and entrepreneurs coordinate policies, are really covers for MITI's "remote control" of the industrial world; and he speaks somewhat cynically of ''Japanese-style free competition."

⁴

And a foreign analyst, John Campbell, shrewdly draws attention to the fact that "nearly everyone involved with Japanese budgeting finds it in his interest to magnify the role played by the majority party."

⁵

The origins of this separation between power and authority are to be found in Japan's feudal past and in the emergence of the developmental state during the Meiji era. For reasons that will be made clear in a moment, Japan in the late nineteenth century adopted for its new political system a version of what Weber called "monarchic constitutionalism," the form of government that Bismarck gave to imperial Germany. The Bismarckian system is described by Weber's editors as follows: "The prime minister remained responsible to the king, not to parliament, and the army also remained under the king's control. In practice, this arrangement gave extraordinary power first to Bismarck, then to the Prussian and Imperial bureaucracy, both vis-à-vis the monarch and the parliament."

⁶

Japan had some reasons of its own, in addition to Bismarck's personal influence on a few key Meiji leaders, for finding this arrangement preferable to the other models it looked at in the course of its "modernization." One of the most serious consequences for Japan of adopting this system was its decision in 1941 to go to war with the United States and Great Britaina decision in which neither the monarch nor the parliament participated. But what is perhaps most important more than a generation after the Pacific War is that the system persisted and became even stronger, even though it was formally abolished by the Constitution of 1947.

The ancestors of the modern Japanese bureaucrats are the samurai of the feudal era. During the two-and-a-half centuries of peace that the Tokugawa shogunate enforced, the feudal warriors slowly evolved into what one group of scholars has called a "governmentalized class" or a "service nobility."

⁷

Constituting some 6 to 7 percent of the population, these samurai did not yet form a modern bureaucracy, if by this one means what Weber has called the most rational and imper-