MITI and the Japanese miracle

Page 65

sure from new entering classes advancing from below, and the usual retirement age for the vice-minister himself is slightly over 50. The practice is dictated by the rigid seniority system of the bureaucracy, but as we shall explain below, it has been turned to the advantage of the state as another very important channel of communication with the society.

The process of separating out those who will resign early and those who will stay in the ministry is called

kata-tataki

(the tap on the shoulder) or

mabiki

(thinning out). It is the responsibility of the vice-minister and the chief of the Secretariat, who are also responsible for finding the soon-to-be-retired officials good new positions on boards of directors. The final weeding out comes at the vice-ministerial level, when one man from one class is chosen by the outgoing vice-minister as his own replacement and when all the new vice-minister's classmates must resign to insure that he has absolute seniority in the ministry. The new vice-minister in turn devotes his efforts to seeing that these high-ranking retirees (and fellow classmates) get good amakudari landing spots. New positions for retiring vice-ministers are found for them by the minister and by the ministry's elder statesmen (sempai).

Competition in the maneuvering for high positions in a ministry normally occurs among classes and not individuals. For example, the 25 members of the class of May 1947 in the Ministry of Finance organized themselves as a club, the Satsuki Kai (May Club), which continued in amity for 31 years until 1978, when it had only one member left, Okura * Masataka, the director of the Tax Bureau.

⁷²

Even if not formally organized as a club, a class will sometimes meet and caucus as a body during periods of stress within a ministry in order to agree on common policies (the various classes in MITI met separately in 1963, at the time of Sahashi's initial failure to be appointed vice-minister, one of the big crises in MITI history, which I shall describe fully in Chapter 7).

Not every class can produce a vice-minister; if it did he could occupy the office for only a few months, which would greatly damage the effectiveness of a ministry's chief executive officer. Therefore, some classes have to be passed over. As a result of this factor, a chief of personnel in the Secretariat will sometimes attempt to remove promising members of rival classes from the competition in order to keep his own class in the running. Many of Sahashi's opponents have accused him of using his years as the personnel section chief to rig the succession. Whatever the case, the classes of 1935 and 1936, which lay between that of the outgoing vice-minister (1934) and Sahashi's own