Chalmers Johnson - MITI and the Japanese miracle

jimu jikan

, which I have rendered simply as "vice-minister"). The Japanese prime minister thus has the power to name only about 20 ministers, plus 4 party officials, whereas the American president, for example, appoints at least 1,000 people to posts in the bureaucracy (one Japanese analyst counted 916 bureaucratic appointments made by President Carter during early 1977).

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The prime minister is also guided by the political need to balance factions within the LDP and only rarely by the qualifications of a politician for a particular ministerial post.

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The Japanese bureaucracy jealously guards the practice of making no political appointments below the ministerial level; the bureaucrats believe that this helps establish their claim to be above politics and to speak only for the national interest. One of the bureaucracy's greatest fears is "political interference" in its internal affairs or, worse, a ministry's being made subservient to a party or a politician. Even though the minister is legally in command of and responsible for everything that happens in a ministry, a delicate relationship between him and the vice-minister inevitably exists from the outset. The norm is for the minister to fear his bureaucrats and to be dominated by them; one journalist suggests that the only time a minister ever enjoys his post is on the day he is photographed in formal dress at the Imperial Palace as part of the cabinet's investiture ceremony.

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If this norm prevails, the bureaucrats are satisfied. But what they really want is a minister who will leave them alone while at the same time taking responsibility for the ministry and protecting it from intrusion by other politicians or

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The secretary-general of the LDPone of the 4 party leaders under the party president (who is simultaneously the prime minister)appoints an additional 24 parliamentary vice-ministers, 2 (1 for each house) in the ministries of Finance, Agriculture and Forestry, and International Trade and Industry, and 1 in each of the other ministries. These vice-ministers are supposed to provide liaison between the ministries and the Diet, but "the posts' chief attraction is that they furnish the politicians a chance to use the ministry's facilities to do favors for their constituents (thus bettering themselves in the elections), and for other politicians (thus bettering themselves in the party)." See Nathaniel B. Thayer,

How the Conservatives Rule Japan

(Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1969), p. 279. The

Mainichi

observes that, like an appendix in a human body, the parliamentary vice-ministers do not seem to perform a vital function. They are invariably appointed with an eye to rewarding factions within the party and not to the effective functioning of either the bureaucracy or the Diet. See

Japan Times

, May 7, 1974, and December 27, 1975.

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outside interests, particularly business interests. And this requires that a minister be a powerful politicianwho may have ideas of his own. If he is also a former bureaucrat, perhaps even one from the ministry to which he has been appointed, the relationship can get quite complex.

Ministry of Finance officials claim to fear powerful ministers from their own service, men such as Kaya Okinori, Ikeda Hayato, or Fukuda Takeo.

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Ikeda, in particular, was always an activist minister in whatever ministry he headed; and he became famous for shaking up the Ministry of Finance in order to remove fiscal conservatives who were blocking his plans for rapid economic growth, and also in order to enlist the ministry in support of his own political ambitions.

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The trade and industry bureaucrats generally liked Ikeda when he was MITI minister, largely because they agreed with him, but when they disagreedas for example over the pace of trade liberalization in 1960he won. He also once gave orders that MITI men could not talk to the press without his approval because he was tired of reading in the newspapers about new economic initiatives that he knew nothing about.

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He did not, however, interfere in ministerial personnel affairs.

Ikeda represented the unusual case of an ex-bureaucrat being an activist minister. Although somewhat trying for bureaucrats, such types do not pose a real threat to them. Much more serious are activist ministers from a party politician's (tojinha*) background. Their efforts to exert influence over a ministry can set off shock waves throughout Japanese politics that reverberate for years; details of cases in which this has occurred are repeated in every Japanese book on the central government. Probably the most famous case is that of Kono* Ichiro* (18981965) and his efforts to bring the Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry under his personal control.

Kono was an old follower of Hatoyama Ichiro in the prewar Seiyukai*. After his depurge in 1951 he returned to politics as an opponent of Yoshida's bureaucratic mainstream. With the unification of the two conservative parties into the LDP, he served as minister of agriculture and forestry in the first Hatoyama cabinet, as director-general of the Economic Planning Agency in the first Kishi cabinet, and as agriculture minister and then construction minister in the second and third Ikeda cabinets. As minister of construction in 1964, he was in charge of the Tokyo Olympics, Japan's debut on the postwar world scene as a rising economic power. After Ikeda's death Kono led a major effort by the combined tojinha to seize control of the party, but he was defeated by Sato* Eisaku and died shortly thereafter.

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When Kono * first became minister of agriculture in December 1954, he intervened powerfully in the internal personnel affairs of the ministry. His instrument was a bureaucrat named Yasuda Zen'ichiro*, whom he promoted to the post of chief of the Secretariat (in the Ministry of Agriculture, the last step before the vice-ministership and the position responsible for all ministerial appointments) over the heads of many of his seniors. Yasuda then transferred or demoted bureaucrats who did not support Kono. Yasuda was a willing participant in these operations because he hoped to have a political career himself, after retirement, as Kono's* protégé. He ended his bureaucratic service as chief of the Agriculture Ministry's Food Agency (July 1961 to January 1962), and then stood for and lost election to the lower house as a member of the Kono faction.

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Other ministries point to him as a prime example of the disasters that can befall a bureaucrat and a ministry if its members break ranks and allow a politician to use one of them for his own purposes.

Agriculture is often said to be the first ministry to have been "politicized" by the LDP because of the LDP's dependence on the farm vote. However, agriculture ministries are rarely "nonpolitical" in any country. At least one other ministry in Japan, Education, has always been under tight LDP control because of the party's ideological struggle with the communist-dominated teachers' union; there has never been even a pretense of bureaucratic independence at Education. As for MITI, over the years since its creation in 1949, prime ministers and ministers have attempted to gain control and use it for political purposes. MITI bureaucrats have been implacable in their resistance to these efforts, often citing the negative example of Kono and agriculture. We shall analyze some of these MITI cases in detail later in this book, since they have often influenced the basic industrial policies of the ministry.

Some party politician ministers, even activist ones, have been welcomed at MITI because of their effectiveness in getting things done in the Diet: Tanaka Kakuei, Nakasone Yasuhiro, and Komoto* Toshio are examples. Even when relations are good, however, the bureaucrats have in the back of their minds the danger of corruption when dealing with nonbureaucratic party politicians (corruption charges have been brought in postwar Japan against ex-bureaucrat politicians, but they have usually been make to stick only in the case of tojinha* politicians). If a minister should attempt to name the vice-minister (by custom the outgoing MITI vice-minister names his own successor) or otherwise alter the internal norms of bureaucratic life, warfare is inevitable. MITI officials have been known to cancel ministerial confer-