MITI and the Japanese miracle

Page 79

reaucracies. It is the smallest of the economic ministries in terms of personnel, and it controls the smallest share of the general account budget. This last feature is important because it frees MITI from the commanding influence of the Finance Ministry's Budget Bureau, which all the other ministries must cultivate. MITI exercises control over money through its ability to approve credit or authorize expenditures by the Japan Development Bank, the Electric Power Development Company, the Export-Import Bank, the Smaller Business Finance Corporation, the Bank for Commerce and Industrial Cooperatives, the Japan Petroleum Development Corporation, and the Productivity Headquarters, all of which are public corporations that it controlsor in which its views are decisive.

¹⁰⁹

Although MITI's official budget in fiscal 1956, for example, was only ¥8.2 billion, the MITI Press Club concluded that the ministry actually supervised the spending of some ¥160.9 billion.

¹¹⁰

MITI's internal pecking order is different from that in other ministries. Although most of its vice-ministers have served as chiefs of one of the sections in the Secretariat, the Secretariat itself is not the final spotor "waiting room" (

machiai-shitsu

)for the vice-ministership, as it is in other ministries. The internal MITI rank order is as follows:

1. vice-minister

2. chief, Industrial Policy Bureau (before 1973, the Enterprises Bureau, which was created in 1942)

3. director-general, Natural Resources and Energy Agency

4. director-general, Medium and Smaller Enterprises Agency

5. director-general, Patent Agency

6. chief, International Trade Policy Bureau

7. chief, Machinery and Information Industries Bureau

8. chief, Minister's Secretariat

9. chief, Basic Industries Bureau

10. chief, Industrial Location and Environmental Protection Bureau

11. chief, Consumer Goods Industries Bureau

12. chief, Trade Bureau (the old Trade Promotion Bureau)

¹¹¹

The high status of the Industrial Policy Bureau is a reflection of the internal factional fighting that has gone on continuously within the ministry since it was reorganized in 1949. In this fighting, which was between the industrial faction (also called the "control" or "domestic" faction) and the international faction (also called the "trade" or "liberal" faction), the industrial faction and its policies dominated the ministry until 1966, and its headquarters was the Industrial Policy Bureau. During the 1970's a new breed of internationalists took over the