Chalmers Johnson - MITI and the Japanese miracle

sotomawari

, or "going around the track"). Within MITI, in recent years most members of a class will also be posted overseas for a year in a consulate, an embassy, a university, or an office of JETRO (Japan External Trade Organization). Not all sections or

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posts in a ministry are equal. The general affairs section of each bureau is the most important section in the bureau, and the three main sections in the Minister's Secretariat (Daijin Kanbo *)those for personnel, general coordination, and budget and accounts, as they are known in MITIare the most important sections in the ministry. A member of a class who passes through or heads several of these on his sotomawari is said to be on the "elite course" (

erito

*

kosu

*).

Nonelite class B exam bureaucrats do not circulate nearly so frequently. The pattern among them is to settle down in one section for years and become what is called a "walking dictionary" or "human encyclopedia" (

iki-jibiki

), the common term for those who do the detailed work of a section and who show the new career officers the ropes. Occasionally a walking dictionary will be promoted to section chief, but this is rare, and it never occurs in a key policy-making section.

*

Promotion to section chief is virtually guaranteed to every career officer who does not make some major mistake. Table 5 shows the relative speed of promotion as of the end of 1975 for the various classes in the five economic ministries. It reveals that although both the Finance and MITI vice-ministers were from the classes of 1944, Finance was three years slower than MITI in making its new officers chiefs of section (in 1975, the class of 1958 at Finance was just getting their sections while at MITI the class of 1961 was already at that point). Competition over promotion begins beyond the section chief level.

There are only a limited number of bureau chief positions in a ministry, and obviously not every member of an entering class can have one. Those who are promoted are still in the running for the vice-ministership; those who are not are compelled to resignor, as it is known in the Japanese government, to "descend from heaven" (amakudari) into a lucrative job in a public corporation or private industry. Ultimately everyone must "descend" because of the implacable pres-

*

In MITI, for example, Abe Shinshichi, a former army paymaster who entered MITI service without taking the higher officials exam, rose to head the Vehicles Section in the Heavy Industries Bureau and ultimately became chief of the Shikoku regional bureau before retirement. Neither, however, is an important post. The Vehicles Section is avoided by career officers because it supervises bicycle and auto racing; it is said to be the only office in MITI with a regular subscription to the sports newspapers. During the last years of the occupation, criminal elements came to dominate bicycle racing in Japan; and after many public protests, the government turned bicycle racing over to MITI to clean up and to generate income from gambling at the tracks for public utilities and local finance. The Vehicles Section manages this; it should be distinguished from the Automobile Section in the same bureau, which is an important post. See Policy Review Company, ed.,

Tsusan-sho*

,

sono hito to soshiki

(MITI: its personnel and organization) (Tokyo: Seisaku Jiho* Sha, 1968), pp. 2056.

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TABLE

5

Relative Rates of Promotion by Entering Class (as of December 1, 1975)

Ministry

Vice- minister

Director-general, external bureau

Chief, internal bureau

Deputy chief, bureau; or department head

Chief, the three Secretariat Sections

Chief, General Affairs Section in bureau or agency

First ap- pointment, section chief

Chief, regional bureau

Finance

1944

1946

19461948 (I)

1948 (II)1950

19511952

19511952

1958

19481952

MITI

1944

19451947 (II)

1947 (I)1948 (II)

1948 (II)1951

1952

19521953

1961

19491951

Agriculture

1945

19451947 (I)

19461948

19481953

19521954

19531954

1960

19481951

Transportation

1943

1946

19461948 (II)

1948 (I)1951

1953

19531955

1961

19521954

Construction

1944

1945

19451949

19491952

19511952

19521953

1958

none

SOURCE

: Watanabe Yasuo, "Komuin * no kyaria" (Careers of officials), in Tsuji Kiyoaki, ed.,

Gyoseigaku*

koza*

(Lectures on the science of administration), Tokyo, 1976, 4: 191.

NOTE

: The economic ministries recruited spring (I) and autumn (II) classes during 1947 and 1948 to meet their expanded duties under economic control.

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sure from new entering classes advancing from below, and the usual retirement age for the vice-minister himself is slightly over 50. The practice is dictated by the rigid seniority system of the bureaucracy, but as we shall explain below, it has been turned to the advantage of the state as another very important channel of communication with the society.

The process of separating out those who will resign early and those who will stay in the ministry is called

kata-tataki

(the tap on the shoulder) or

mabiki

(thinning out). It is the responsibility of the vice-minister and the chief of the Secretariat, who are also responsible for finding the soon-to-be-retired officials good new positions on boards of directors. The final weeding out comes at the vice-ministerial level, when one man from one class is chosen by the outgoing vice-minister as his own replacement and when all the new vice-minister's classmates must resign to insure that he has absolute seniority in the ministry. The new vice-minister in turn devotes his efforts to seeing that these high-ranking retirees (and fellow classmates) get good amakudari landing spots. New positions for retiring vice-ministers are found for them by the minister and by the ministry's elder statesmen (sempai).

Competition in the maneuvering for high positions in a ministry normally occurs among classes and not individuals. For example, the 25 members of the class of May 1947 in the Ministry of Finance organized themselves as a club, the Satsuki Kai (May Club), which continued in amity for 31 years until 1978, when it had only one member left, Okura * Masataka, the director of the Tax Bureau.

72

Even if not formally organized as a club, a class will sometimes meet and caucus as a body during periods of stress within a ministry in order to agree on common policies (the various classes in MITI met separately in 1963, at the time of Sahashi's initial failure to be appointed vice-minister, one of the big crises in MITI history, which I shall describe fully in Chapter 7).

Not every class can produce a vice-minister; if it did he could occupy the office for only a few months, which would greatly damage the effectiveness of a ministry's chief executive officer. Therefore, some classes have to be passed over. As a result of this factor, a chief of personnel in the Secretariat will sometimes attempt to remove promising members of rival classes from the competition in order to keep his own class in the running. Many of Sahashi's opponents have accused him of using his years as the personnel section chief to rig the succession. Whatever the case, the classes of 1935 and 1936, which lay between that of the outgoing vice-minister (1934) and Sahashi's own