MITI and the Japanese miracle

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ences or to declare them private gatherings when parliamentary viceministers insisted on attending.

⁵⁶

From MITI's point of view, the ideal minister was someone like Shiina Etsusaburo* (18981979), an old trade and industry bureaucrat who had no desire to intervene in ministerial affairs and who was also a powerful LDP politician and an effective Diet debater (in the Japanese context, this means a politician who can speak politely and at length without actually saying anything of substancean art that Shiina had mastered). In general, prewar ministers had more influence over their ministries than postwar ministers, a change that again reflects the rise in bureaucratic power in the postwar era.

Although relations between bureaucrats and politicians are understandably delicate in the Japanese political system, the focus of bureaucratic life is within the ministry itselfand there informal norms and their occasional violation generate real passion. Landau and Stout remind us that "bureaucracies are fusions of artificially contrived and naturally developed systems. Apart from their formal properties, they are characterized by interest groups, personal networks, patron-client relations, brokers, and derivative coalitions."

⁵⁷

These informal ties sustain an organization's "culture," helping it to function effectively by inspiring loyalty, easing communications problems, socializing newcomers, generating new ideas in the clash of values and so forth. Throughout this book I shall be dealing with MITI's fabricated propertiesabove all with the famous industry-specific vertical bureaus that were its formal organization from 1939 to 1973but it is the informal practices and traditions that give life to an organization and that make its formal organization interesting.

Kusayanagi Daizo* argues that all human relations in Japanese society are based on four kinds of "factions" (

batsu

):

keibatsu

(family and matrimonial cliques),

kyodobatsu

* (clansmen, or persons from the same locality),

gakubatsu

(school and university classmates), and

zaibatsu

("factions based on money," an indefinite use of the term that should not be confused with its specific reference to the family-dominated industrial empires, or zaibatsu, of prewar Japan).

⁵⁸

All of these occur in the bureaucracy, but the first two are of minor significance and can be dealt with speedily.

Evidence of keibatsu can be found in MITI. To cite a few examples, Hatoyama Michio, formerly a physicist in MITI's Industrial Technology Institute and after retirement head of Sony's technical department, is married to the second daughter of former Prime Minister Hatoyama Ichiro*. The wife of Takashima Setsuo, who retired from MITI in 1969 after serving as vice-minister of the Economic Planning Agency, is the