Chalmers Johnson - MITI and the Japanese miracle

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story back any further is to lose focus on the postwar economic miracle, but to fail to incorporate the history of the prewar MCI is to ignore MITI's traditions and collective consciousness. MITI men learned their trade in MCI, MM, and the Economic Stabilization Board. These were once such fearsome agencies that it was said the mere mention of their names would stop a child from crying. Admirers of the Japanese miracle such as I have a duty to show how the disastrous national experiences of the 1940's gave birth to the achievements of the 1950's and 1960's.

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Two

The Economic Bureaucracy

When the analyst discovers in the course of political research a persistent discrepancy between the stated principles and actual practices of a society, he has a strong impulse to ring the critical alarm bells to warn of a lack of legitimacy, of the operation of covert powers, or of simple hypocrisy. The end product is usually a muckraking or critical book, and the subject of Japanese politics has produced a plethora of them, by both Japanese and foreigners. I myself shall add a few items to the list of anomalies in Japanese bureaucratic life, but my purpose is not criticism. Instead, I am concerned to explain why the discrepancy between the formal authority of either the Emperor (prewar) or the Diet (postwar) and the actual powers of the state bureaucracy exists and persists, and why this discrepancy contributes to the success of the developmental state.

Japan has long displayed a marked separation in its political system between reigning and ruling, between the powers of the legislative branch and the executive branch, between the majority party and the mandarinateand, in the last analysis, between authority and power. As a result, a discrepancy exists between the constitutional and the actual locus of sovereignty that is so marked the Japanese themselves have invented terms to discuss it

omote

(outer, in plain view) and

ura

(inner, hidden from sight), or

tatemae

(principle; Edward Seidensticker once proposed the word should be translated "pretense") and

honne

(actual practice).

1

Japanese and foreign observers are aware that the discrepancy generates a degree of hypocrisy or euphemism, and they often enjoy criticizing this hypocrisy. Kakuma Takashi, for example, argues that in the postwar world the business community likes to pretend that it is

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"yielding under protest" to the powers of MITI when it is actually doing nothing more than pursuing its traditional relationship with the bureaucracy.

2

Goshi* Kohei* is irritated by the senior business leaders who refer their decisions for approval to government section chiefs often not much older than their own grandchildren and then speak ill of them back at the Industrial Club.

3

Obayashi Kenji believes that the numerous "deliberation councils" (what Berger calls "policy councils," or

shingikai

), in which officials and entrepreneurs coordinate policies, are really covers for MITI's "remote control" of the industrial world; and he speaks somewhat cynically of ''Japanese-style free competition."

4

And a foreign analyst, John Campbell, shrewdly draws attention to the fact that "nearly everyone involved with Japanese budgeting finds it in his interest to magnify the role played by the majority party."

5

The origins of this separation between power and authority are to be found in Japan's feudal past and in the emergence of the developmental state during the Meiji era. For reasons that will be made clear in a moment, Japan in the late nineteenth century adopted for its new political system a version of what Weber called "monarchic constitutionalism," the form of government that Bismarck gave to imperial Germany. The Bismarckian system is described by Weber's editors as follows: "The prime minister remained responsible to the king, not to parliament, and the army also remained under the king's control. In practice, this arrangement gave extraordinary power first to Bismarck, then to the Prussian and Imperial bureaucracy, both vis-à-vis the monarch and the parliament."

6

Japan had some reasons of its own, in addition to Bismarck's personal influence on a few key Meiji leaders, for finding this arrangement preferable to the other models it looked at in the course of its "modernization." One of the most serious consequences for Japan of adopting this system was its decision in 1941 to go to war with the United States and Great Britaina decision in which neither the monarch nor the parliament participated. But what is perhaps most important more than a generation after the Pacific War is that the system persisted and became even stronger, even though it was formally abolished by the Constitution of 1947.

The ancestors of the modern Japanese bureaucrats are the samurai of the feudal era. During the two-and-a-half centuries of peace that the Tokugawa shogunate enforced, the feudal warriors slowly evolved into what one group of scholars has called a "governmentalized class" or a "service nobility."

7

Constituting some 6 to 7 percent of the population, these samurai did not yet form a modern bureaucracy, if by this one means what Weber has called the most rational and imper-

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sonal form of state administration. For Weber true bureaucratic power is vested in an "office," and bureaucratic power in this sense "does not establish a relationship to a

person

, like the vassal's or disciple's faith under feudal or patrimonial authority, but rather is devoted to

impersonal

and

functional

purposes."

8

During the Tokugawa period the samurai became administrative officials rather than warriors, but they still occupied a status for which they received a stipend, rather than offering a particular competence for which they were paid a salary.

9

This emphasis on status rather than on the performance of an occupation was passed on under the Meiji Constitution to the bureaucrats, who enjoyed such a position legally until the Constitution of 1947 ended it, and to

their

successors, who still enjoy it informally more than thirty years later because of the persistence of tradition and bureaucratic dominance in postwar Japan.

The Meiji leaders did not plan to perpetuate samurai government under a new guise, nor for that matter were they much interested in creating a modern state officialdom. Their reasons for creating a "nonpolitical" civil bureaucracy were, in fact, highly political. They were trying to respond to strident public criticism of the monopoly of power by the two feudal domains (Satsuma and Choshu*) that had led the successful movement against the Tokugawa shogunate, and the corruption that this domination was generating. They also hoped to demonstrate their "modernity" to the West in order to hasten revision of the unequal treaties that had been forced on Japan. And, most important, they wanted to retain authoritarian control after 1890, when the new parliament (National Diet) opened and political parties began public campaigning for a share of power.

10

The state bureaucracy and the cabinet both preceded the Meiji Constitution, the Diet, and the formation of political parties in Japan by some five to twenty years. The results were predictable. In seeking to forestall competitive claims to their own power by the leaders of the political parties, the Meiji oligarchs created a weak parliament and also sought to counterbalance it with a bureaucracy they believed they could staff with their own supporters, or at least keep under their personal control. But over time, with the bureaucracy installed at the center of government and with the passing of the oligarchs, it was the bureaucratsboth military and civilianwho arrogated more and more power to themselves.