MITI and the Japanese miracle

Page 46

former bureaucrats, each of whom had had a full and very successful career in his respective ministry, dominated Japanese politics from 1957 to 1972: Kishi was prime minister from February 1957 to July 1960, Ikeda from July 1960 to November 1964, and Sato * from November 1964 to July 1972. Yoshida himself, a former vice-minister of foreign affairs and ambassador to Great Britain, served as prime minister from May 1946 to May 1947 and from October 1948 to December 1954.

In addition to these leaders, many middle-ranking Diet members were also drawn from the ranks of state officialdom. In 1946 Liberal Party (conservative) ex-bureaucrat Diet members accounted for only 2.7 percent of the total. Yoshida raised the number to 18.2 percent in 1949, and this proportion has held firm ever since. As of 1970, 69 members of the House of Representatives (23 percent) and 50 members of the House of Councillors (37 percent) were ex-bureaucrats belonging to the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP). In 1977 the respective figures were 27 percent and 35 percent.

³⁴

Party politicians holding a safe electoral base (

jiban

) in one of the prefectural constituencies did not take this intrusion of bureaucrats with equanimity. Many of them believed, and still believe today, that bureaucrats were not so much becoming politicians as they were displacing politicians and contributing to a dangerous blurring of functions between the executive and legislative branches. In the election of October 1952 approximately 40 percent of some 329 prewar and wartime politicians recently released from the ban against their holding public office were reelected to the Diet. They held about 30 percent of the seats. From that point on, the main configuration of postwar Diet politics was established: the so-called mainstream of the conservative forces was occupied by retired bureaucrats, and the antimainstream by old (later called "pure") politicians who did not come from a background in the state apparatus. In 1955 the two main conservative parties, successors to the Seiyukai* and Minseito* of the prewar era, united in order to confront the growing strength of the opposition socialists. They created the huge coalition Liberal Democratic Party that has controlled the Diet without interruption ever since.

Within the LDP the bureaucratic mainstream and the party politicians' (

tojinha

*) antimainstream factions compete with each other, with the bureaucrats usually dominant; but for the sake of party unity neither group is ever totally excluded. The second Kishi cabinet of 1958 established bureaucratic supremacy when eight of the twelve ministries were headed by ex-bureaucrats. Former bureaucrats also held many influential positions in the party's Policy Affairs Research Council and on the key standing committees of the Diet, where the plans