MITI and the Japanese miracle

Page 57

and Industry and an ex-MITI bureaucrat turned politician in the Diet during the 1950's and 1960's, illustrates both keibatsu and kyodobatsu *. He was born in 1898 into a commoner family in Odawara, Kanagawa prefecture, but as a young official he married the daughter of the sister of Mori Kaku's wife and thereby acquired the prewar secretary-general of the Seiyukai* party as his uncle. Through this connection and his background as a native of Kanagawa, he later succeeded to Mori's secure constituency in the Kanagawa third electoral district, which he represented in the Diet for about twenty years.

⁶²

Keibatsu and kyodobatsu are part of any large Japanese organization, but gakubatsu is without question the single most important influence within the Japanese state bureaucracy. The cliques of university classmates are inseparable from bureaucratic life, because it is their university degrees and their success in passing the Higher-level Public Officials Examination that set bureaucrats apart from other elites in the society. Gakubatsu also forms the most pervasive "old boy" network throughout the society as a whole.

On March 1, 1886, the government issued an Imperial Ordinance stating that "the Imperial University has the objectives of giving instruction in the arts and sciences and inquiring into abstruse principles required by the state." This order established Tokyo Imperial Universityor Todai*, as it is known in abbreviationas an institution to train an administrative service that would replace the samurai of Choshu* and Satsuma within the government. Todai graduates were always preferred by the government, but in the twentieth century, with the establishment of other modern universities, the government adopted the practice of examining all prospective state officials, including Tokyo University graduates. These higher civil service entrance examinations were extremely difficult; Spaulding calculates that the failure rate on the main exam during the period 192843 was 90 percent.

⁶³

The entrance examination system continued after the war with little change. During 1977 about 53,000 people took the Higher-level Public Officials Examination, and only about 1,300 passed, a ratio of 1 passer to 41 applicants. Because of its original orientation toward education for government service, as well as its general excellence, Tokyo University has always provided the greatest number of applicants who pass the examinations (see Table 3).

Not all officials in a ministry must be certified through the civil service examinations, however. Before the war those who passed the examinations received Imperial appointments; those who did not take the examinations received ordinary (

hannin

) appointments. The distinction is roughly equivalent to that between commissioned and