MITI and the Japanese miracle

Page 78

ment Agency's staff was fixed initially at 500 officials, and some twelve different ministries and agencies supplied them. The Welfare Ministry headed the list with 283, then Agriculture with 61, MITI with 26, the Economic Planning Agency with 21, and so forth. The fighting over the leadership posts was fierce. Welfare won it when the vice-minister of Welfare himself transferred to the new agency as its vice-minister. Welfare also captured two bureau chief positions and the position of chief of the Secretariat. Finance and Agriculture split the two remaining bureau directorships, and MITI got only a councillor's slot (

shingikan

). Of the 21 sections in the Environment Agency, Welfare names the chief of 7, MITI 3, Economic Planning and Agriculture 2 each, and Finance, Construction, Home, Labor, Police, Transport, and the Prime Minister's Office 1 each.

¹⁰⁵

Watanabe notes that ''this pattern is true for all newly created agencies."

¹⁰⁶

The struggle for nawabari (literally, "roped-off areas") is one of the passions of the Japanese bureaucracy. However, this may well be one of the hidden, if unintended, strengths of the Japanese system. As Hollerman argues, "If 'the government' of Japan were actually a highly coordinated set of agencies, its powers could be applied with overwhelming force. Instead, partly as a result of sheer ambition for status and partly as a result of divergent interests within the society itself, there is intense rivalry and jealousy among the ruling agencies and their personnel. In competing for power, they tend to neutralize one another's authority to some extent."

¹⁰⁷

On the other hand, Sakakibara, himself an ex-bureaucrat, defends what he calls the vertical organization of the bureaucracy because of the discipline and solidarity it instills in officials. Rather than committing themselves to some abstract ideal, they join a "family" when they enter an old-line ministry. Given its semilifetime employment system and its vertical organization, each ministry must create sufficient public corporations, affiliated associations of clients (

gaikaku dantai

), and colonial outposts for its retired and soon-to-retire seniors. These commitments cause a ministry to become a "welfare community," which in turn becomes an object of affection for its members and not merely an impersonal office.

¹⁰⁸

Efforts at administrative reform in Japan have occasionally produced a reduction in personnel or the abolition of a grossly superfluous unit, but they have never affected the vertical structure.

MITI itself, as the descendant of one of the original ministries dating back to 1881, is certainly a "welfare community," but it also has several characteristics that distinguish it from the other economic bu-