MITI and the Japanese miracle

Page 74

tem of 1885 continues unchanged in its essentials to the present. He concludes, "Bureaucrats are officials of the various ministries first and only second are they servants of the nation."

⁹⁶

The postwar expansion of the bureaucracy followed by efforts to reduce its size reinforced this tradition. A bureaucrat's security and livelihood became dependent on maintaining or expanding his ministry's jurisdiction. Shrinking jurisdictions threaten not only the bureaucrats' active-duty positions but also their amakudari prospects, since a ministry needs clients and captive organizations to hire those of its retired members who do not have readily marketable skills. Tradition and circumstances thus produce an intense "territorial consciousness" (

nawabari ishiki

), punctuatedin Sakakibara's wordsby "gangster-like struggles over jurisdiction" (

yakuza no nawabari arasoi

) throughout the state bureaucracy.

⁹⁷

Whatever the issue, bureaucrats' willingness to fight to defend the interests of their service has a marked delaying and distorting effect on Japanese governmental policy. Many decisions of the Japanese government are incomprehensible to the outside observer unless he or she understands the bureaucratic interests at stake and the compromises that these interests necessitate. In 1974, for example, when Prime Minister Tanaka proposed the creation of an overseas economic cooperation ministry, warfare among the existing ministries burst into the open. MITI had already tried to get written into the 1974 budget a proposal for a "mining and manufacturing overseas trade development corporation," and Agriculture wanted an "overseas agriculture and forestry development corporation." They were actively competing with each other for a share of what looked like an expansion of Japan's economic aid activities. Foreign Affairs promptly objected that it already had two agencies under its jurisdiction that had purposes similar to the proposed ministry. Prime Minister Tanaka ultimately decided on a ministry that would incorporate the two Foreign Affairs agencies but include MITI and Agriculture in their management. Foreign Affairs fought on and finally accepted the new International Cooperation Agency of August 1974 only when it was agreed that it would

not

be a ministry and that a foreign office official would head it.

⁹⁸

When Tanaka was prime minister he also promised in his reelection campaign to create a Medium and Smaller Enterprises Ministry, just as a few years later Prime Minister Fukuda promised to create an Energy Ministry and a Housing Ministry. Regardless of whether this proliferation of ministries would have been a good idea, the reason that none of them ever saw the light of day was not substantive objections but ministerial resistance. MITI mobilized the Agriculture and