Chalmers Johnson - MITI and the Japanese miracle

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ences or to declare them private gatherings when parliamentary viceministers insisted on attending.

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From MITI's point of view, the ideal minister was someone like Shiina Etsusaburo* (18981979), an old trade and industry bureaucrat who had no desire to intervene in ministerial affairs and who was also a powerful LDP politician and an effective Diet debater (in the Japanese context, this means a politician who can speak politely and at length without actually saying anything of substancean art that Shiina had mastered). In general, prewar ministers had more influence over their ministries than postwar ministers, a change that again reflects the rise in bureaucratic power in the postwar era.

Although relations between bureaucrats and politicians are understandably delicate in the Japanese political system, the focus of bureaucratic life is within the ministry itselfand there informal norms and their occasional violation generate real passion. Landau and Stout remind us that "bureaucracies are fusions of artificially contrived and naturally developed systems. Apart from their formal properties, they are characterized by interest groups, personal networks, patron-client relations, brokers, and derivative coalitions."

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These informal ties sustain an organization's "culture," helping it to function effectively by inspiring loyalty, easing communications problems, socializing newcomers, generating new ideas in the clash of values and so forth. Throughout this book I shall be dealing with MITI's fabricated propertiesabove all with the famous industry-specific vertical bureaus that were its formal organization from 1939 to 1973but it is the informal practices and traditions that give life to an organization and that make its formal organization interesting.

Kusayanagi Daizo* argues that all human relations in Japanese society are based on four kinds of "factions" (

batsu

):

keibatsu

(family and matrimonial cliques),

kyodobatsu

* (clansmen, or persons from the same locality),

gakubatsu

(school and university classmates), and

zaibatsu

("factions based on money," an indefinite use of the term that should not be confused with its specific reference to the family-dominated industrial empires, or zaibatsu, of prewar Japan).

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All of these occur in the bureaucracy, but the first two are of minor significance and can be dealt with speedily.

Evidence of keibatsu can be found in MITI. To cite a few examples, Hatoyama Michio, formerly a physicist in MITI's Industrial Technology Institute and after retirement head of Sony's technical department, is married to the second daughter of former Prime Minister Hatoyama Ichiro*. The wife of Takashima Setsuo, who retired from MITI in 1969 after serving as vice-minister of the Economic Planning Agency, is the

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daughter of Kuroda Nagamichi, a former Imperial chamberlain. And Masuda Minoru, director-general of MITI's Natural Resources and Energy Agency in 1975, became a nephew through marriage of Nagano Shigeo, former president of Fuji Steel and one of the great industrial leaders of postwar Japan. Many other examples could be cited.

Before the war the Ministry of Commerce and Industry included in its ranks such high-status figures as Baron Ito * Bunkichi, who was the illegitimate son of the Meiji oligarch Ito Hirobumi and who became the patron of Yoshino Shinji, one of the two or three most important figures in the history of MITI. Kido Koichi*, of noble ancestry, was in the Ministry of Commerce and Industry before the war and became the wartime Lord Keeper of the Privy Seal. Shiina Etsusaburo* was the nephew of Goto* Shimpei, the chief administrator of Taiwan in the Meiji era, president of the South Manchurian Railroad, and the rebuilder of Tokyo after the earthquake of 1923.

These connections and possible influences are important in Japan, and they are not necessarily accidental. A great many young bureaucrats ask their section chiefs to arrange their marriages, and a section chief will often have keibatsu considerations in mind when he promotes a match. Nonetheless, most informed observers conclude that keibatsu is not as important in the postwar bureaucracy as it was before the war.

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Still, some MITI officials report that it is better for one's career to have a good keibatsu than a poor one, and Kubota notes that "on the average the 19491959 higher civil servants [the group that he studied in depth] more often had prominent fathers-in-law than prominent fathers."

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It appears that bureaucrats in Japan are good catches as husbands.

Kyodobatsu* are similarly present among bureaucrats but of comparatively slight influence. A former MITI vice-minister, Tokunaga Hisatsugu (executive director of New Japan Steel after retirement), notes that when he was vice-minister, the minister was Ishii Mitsujiro*, one of the major figures of postwar conservative politics. Ishii was not only his "senior" (

sempai

), but they both came from the same area of Fukuoka prefecturethat is, they both belong to what is called the same

kyoto

* (literally, "village party"). According to Tokunaga, this factor somewhat inhibited him in his relations with Ishii.

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Kishi Nobusuke, Matsuoka Yosuke*, and Ayukawa Gisuke all were natives of Yamaguchi prefecture, and each has said that this contributed to their collaboration in the industrial development of Manchuria during the 1930's (Kishi is also the true elder brother of Sato* Eisaku, although Kishi was adopted into a different lineage). The career of Kogane Yoshiteru, a major figure in the prewar Ministry of Commerce

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and Industry and an ex-MITI bureaucrat turned politician in the Diet during the 1950's and 1960's, illustrates both keibatsu and kyodobatsu *. He was born in 1898 into a commoner family in Odawara, Kanagawa prefecture, but as a young official he married the daughter of the sister of Mori Kaku's wife and thereby acquired the prewar secretary-general of the Seiyukai* party as his uncle. Through this connection and his background as a native of Kanagawa, he later succeeded to Mori's secure constituency in the Kanagawa third electoral district, which he represented in the Diet for about twenty years.

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Keibatsu and kyodobatsu are part of any large Japanese organization, but gakubatsu is without question the single most important influence within the Japanese state bureaucracy. The cliques of university classmates are inseparable from bureaucratic life, because it is their university degrees and their success in passing the Higher-level Public Officials Examination that set bureaucrats apart from other elites in the society. Gakubatsu also forms the most pervasive "old boy" network throughout the society as a whole.

On March 1, 1886, the government issued an Imperial Ordinance stating that "the Imperial University has the objectives of giving instruction in the arts and sciences and inquiring into abstruse principles required by the state." This order established Tokyo Imperial Universityor Todai*, as it is known in abbreviationas an institution to train an administrative service that would replace the samurai of Choshu* and Satsuma within the government. Todai graduates were always preferred by the government, but in the twentieth century, with the establishment of other modern universities, the government adopted the practice of examining all prospective state officials, including Tokyo University graduates. These higher civil service entrance examinations were extremely difficult; Spaulding calculates that the failure rate on the main exam during the period 192843 was 90 percent.

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The entrance examination system continued after the war with little change. During 1977 about 53,000 people took the Higher-level Public Officials Examination, and only about 1,300 passed, a ratio of 1 passer to 41 applicants. Because of its original orientation toward education for government service, as well as its general excellence, Tokyo University has always provided the greatest number of applicants who pass the examinations (see Table 3).