Chalmers Johnson - MITI and the Japanese miracle

44

Interest groups exist in Japan in great numbers, but there is no theory of pluralism that legitimates their political activities. The parties developed what strength they had before the war by representing private interests to the government, and this heritage too was passed on to their postwar successors. One of the reasons that there are so few private members' bills passed is that virtually all of them are based on appeals from constituents or are intended to serve some special interest. Many party politicians themselves accept the orthodoxy of a vertical relationship between the state's activities and their own activities. "They tend," writes Campbell, "to perceive voters as animated almost solely by particularistic, pork-barrel desires rather than by concern over issues of broad social policy."

45

Although Japan's fused relationship between the executive and legislative branches may be disappointing to liberals, from the point of view of the developmental state it has some hidden advantages. In the postwar world the Diet has replaced the Imperial institution in the role of what Titus has called "the supreme ratifier," the agency that legitimates decisions taken elsewhere.

46

Like the emperor under the Meiji Constitution, the Diet is the public locus of sovereignty, but the same discrepancy that existed earlier between authority and power is still maintained, and for at least some of the same reasons. There is, however, one major difference: the Diet performs these vital functions much more safely, effectively, and democratically than the Imperial institution ever did. For the bureaucracy to have mobilized resources and committed them to a heavy industrial structure as it did in postwar Japan, the claims of interest groups and individual citizens had to be held in check. Although the high-growth policies of the bureaucracy ultimately raised the economic level of all citizens and may thereby have served their diverse interests, the citizens themselves

Page 50

were not consulted. The funds, legislation, and institutions the bureaucracy needed for its programs were enacted by what Wildes has called the "puppet Diet."

47

This "puppet Diet," working through its LDP majority, has nevertheless served as a mediator between the state and society, forcing the state to accommodate those interests that could not be ignoredagriculture and medium and smaller enterprises, for exampleand, on occasion, requiring the state to change course in response to serious problems such as pollution. At the same time, it has held off or forced compromises from those groups whose claims might interfere with the development program. By and large, it has done so equitably, maintaining a comparatively level pattern of income distribution and of hardships.

48

The Diet's unproclaimed mediating role has been the subject of much scrutiny and analysis in Japan. Although there are many different formulations, most of them end up dividing Japanese society into two sets of social groups and institutions, those that are central and those that are peripheral (or privileged and ordinary, first class and second class), with the central groups operating the developmental state for the sake of the society as a whole and not just for their own particular interests. The central institutionsthat is, the bureaucracy, the LDP, and the larger Japanese business concernsin turn maintain a kind of skewed triangular relationship with each other. The LDP's role is to legitimate the work of the bureaucracy while also making sure that the bureaucracy's policies do not stray too far from what the public will tolerate. Some of this serves its own interests, as well; the LDP always insures that the Diet and the bureaucracy are responsive to the farmers' demands because it depends significantly on the overrepresented rural vote. The bureaucracy, meanwhile, staffs the LDP with its own cadres to insure that the party does what the bureaucracy thinks is good for the country as a whole, and guides the business community toward developmental goals. The business community, in turn, supplies massive amounts of funds to keep the LDP in office, although it does not thereby achieve control of the party, which is normally oriented upward, toward the bureaucracy, rather than downward, toward its main patrons.

This triangular relationship sometimes looks conflict ridden and sometimes consensual, but both impressions are deceptive according to Kawanaka Niko*, who maintains that interest groups representing the strategic industrieshe calls them the "prime contractor groups"always hold a privileged relationship with the bureaucracy. The two will sometimes be in conflict, however, with private indus-

Page 51

trial groups or enterprises asking for flexible execution of governmental policies or for partial or technical changes in policies that will benefit one or another of them. The government will be forthcoming, seeking compromises, brokering mergers, offering financial incentives, confronting foreign competitors, and so forth, but the government will also impose on the industries new conditions that are conducive to the government's goals. This conflict is important and time-consuming, but according to Kawanaka it should always be understood as

miuchi

(among relatives).

In the case of outsidersfor example, consumer groups, local conservationists, or groups hostile to the alliance with the United Statesthe government's policy is to ignore them, or if they become very powerful, to seek a compromise with them through the LDP. The Japanese people understand these relationships and support them not as a matter of principle but because of the results they have achieved. They have developed what Kawanaka labels a "structure of organizational double vision," by which he means the tendency for subordinate or dependent parts of the structure to perceive the intentions of the dominant or guiding parts and to formulate their own policies as if the superior's policies were their own. It all looks like consensus to outsiders, but it is, in fact, dictated by a calculation of the balance of forces and a sense of Japan's vulnerability. Rather than consensus, Kawanaka proposes the concept of "interlocking decision-making," which acknowledges the symbiotic relationships among the bureaucracy, LDP, and the business community. The characteristics of such interlocking decisions, he suggests, are bureaucratic leadership, obscured responsibility, and fictive kinship ties.

49

An even more important characteristic for our purposes is a differential access to the government by various groups: the "prime contractors" and vital political support groups have ready access, the less strategically placed groups little accessalthough more than they had under the Meiji Constitution. The channels of preferential access are not formalized, but they exist in the deliberation councils, in a circulation of elites from the bureaucracy to both the political and industrial worlds, and in a vast array of other "old boy" networks to be discussed below. The result is a developmental state much softer and more tolerable than the communist-dominated command economies (with much better performance, too) but with a considerably greater goal-setting and goal-achieving capability than in the market-rational systems.

Personal relations between bureaucrats and politicians in this subtle, malleable system can be quite complex. In each ministry there is

Page 52

only one genuine political appointee, the minister, who is named by the prime minister and is a member of the cabinet. The minister is normally but not invariably a member of the Diet (articles 67 and 68 of the Constitution of 1947 require that the prime minister be elected by and from the members of the Diet, but only a majority of the other ministers must be members). All other officials in a ministry are nonpolitical, the most senior being the administrative vice-minister (