MITI and the Japanese miracle

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as undergo the efforts of the Allied occupation to reform it in a democratic direction. But an unusual thing happened to the bureaucracy under the occupation: it did not by any means escape the Allied reforms unscathed, but a part of the bureaucracythe economic ministriesemerged with their powers enhanced. In fact, the occupation era, 194552, witnessed the highest levels of government control over the economy ever encountered in modern Japan before or since, levels that were decidedly higher than the levels attained during the Pacific War. This is a subject I shall consider in detail in Chapters 4 and 5, but the "reform" of the bureaucracy during the occupation is a necessary preface to any understanding of the prominence of bureaucrats in and out of the ministries in postoccupation Japanese politics.

For reasons that are still none too clear, the occupation authorities, or SCAP (Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers), never singled out the civilian bureaucracy as needing basic reform. However, SCAP eliminated completely from political life one major rival of the economic bureaucracy, the military; and it transformed and severely weakened another, the zaibatsu. Both of these developments propelled the economic bureaucrats into the vacuums thus created. Equally important, SCAP broke up the prewar Ministry of Home Affairs (Naimu-sho *), which had been the most prestigious and powerful of ministries under the Meiji Constitution. The powers of the old Home Ministry were distributed primarily among the new ministries of Construction, Labor, Health and Welfare, Home Affairs (at first called "Local Autonomy"), and the Defense and Police agencies. But the loss of power by the Home Ministry also offered new jurisdictions into which the economic bureaucrats could expand; for example, the Home Ministry's wartime regional bureaus and its police power to enforce rationing passed, respectively, to the Ministry of Commerce and Industry and the Economic Stabilization Board.

SCAP also included the civilian bureaucracy under its purge directives, that is, its campaign to exclude from various public and private positions of responsibility persons designated by category as having been partly responsible for the war.

²¹

A major purpose of the purge was to bring new, younger people into the government. Once again, however, the purge had little effect on the economic ministries. It is hard to calculate exactly how many economic bureaucrats were purged because many appealed on grounds that they were indispensable to the economic recovery effort, but one estimate is that only 42 higher officials (bureau chiefs and above) were purged from the Ministry of Commerce and Industrythe wartime Ministry of Muni-