MITI and the Japanese miracle

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trial groups or enterprises asking for flexible execution of governmental policies or for partial or technical changes in policies that will benefit one or another of them. The government will be forthcoming, seeking compromises, brokering mergers, offering financial incentives, confronting foreign competitors, and so forth, but the government will also impose on the industries new conditions that are conducive to the government's goals. This conflict is important and time-consuming, but according to Kawanaka it should always be understood as

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(among relatives).

In the case of outsidersfor example, consumer groups, local conservationists, or groups hostile to the alliance with the United Statesthe government's policy is to ignore them, or if they become very powerful, to seek a compromise with them through the LDP. The Japanese people understand these relationships and support them not as a matter of principle but because of the results they have achieved. They have developed what Kawanaka labels a "structure of organizational double vision," by which he means the tendency for subordinate or dependent parts of the structure to perceive the intentions of the dominant or guiding parts and to formulate their own policies as if the superior's policies were their own. It all looks like consensus to outsiders, but it is, in fact, dictated by a calculation of the balance of forces and a sense of Japan's vulnerability. Rather than consensus, Kawanaka proposes the concept of "interlocking decision-making," which acknowledges the symbiotic relationships among the bureaucracy, LDP, and the business community. The characteristics of such interlocking decisions, he suggests, are bureaucratic leadership, obscured responsibility, and fictive kinship ties.

⁴⁹

An even more important characteristic for our purposes is a differential access to the government by various groups: the "prime contractors" and vital political support groups have ready access, the less strategically placed groups little accessalthough more than they had under the Meiji Constitution. The channels of preferential access are not formalized, but they exist in the deliberation councils, in a circulation of elites from the bureaucracy to both the political and industrial worlds, and in a vast array of other "old boy" networks to be discussed below. The result is a developmental state much softer and more tolerable than the communist-dominated command economies (with much better performance, too) but with a considerably greater goal-setting and goal-achieving capability than in the market-rational systems.

Personal relations between bureaucrats and politicians in this subtle, malleable system can be quite complex. In each ministry there is