Chalmers Johnson - MITI and the Japanese miracle

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(1937), found their members all occupying terminal positions. The "loser years" in MITI were 1935, 1936, 1938, and 1942.

Each class has its "flowers" (

hana

)that is, candidates with strong credentials for the vice-ministershipand members of the class take pride in one of their comrades representing them at the top. For example, the

ju-hachi-nen

*

gumi no hana

(flowers of the class of 1943) at MITI were Sho* Kiyoshi, Yajima Shiro*, Miyake Yukio, and Yamashita Eimei. During 1973 Sho ended his MITI career as director-general of the Medium and Smaller Enterprises Agency, Miyake as director-general of the Patent Agency, Yajima as chief of the Heavy Industries Bureau, and Yamashita made it to the top as MITI vice-minister from July 1973 to November 1974. Needless to say, when one class produces two vice-ministersas happened twice in MITI (Ishihara Takeo and Ueno Koshichi*, both of the class of 1932, succeeded each other as vice-minister between 1955 and 1960; and Imai Zen'ei and Sahashi Shigeru, both of the class of 1937, succeeded each other as vice-minister between 1963 and 1966)great strains are imposed on the internal norms of ministerial life.

Before the war age grading existed, but it was not as rigorously enforced as after the war. When Yoshino Shinji (class of 1913) became vice-minister of the Ministry of Commerce and Industry in 1931 (he served in that office until 1936), he was only 43 years old and was promoted over several of his seniors. Moreover, at his personal request, one of his seniors (Nakamatsu Shinkyo*, class of 1908) remained on in the ministry as chief of the Patent Bureau for another five years. Within MITI the practice of all classmates or seniors resigning when a new vice-minister takes over appears to have originated in October 1941, when Kishi became minister and appointed Shiina vice-minister. Kishi and Shiina represented the Manchurian faction of promilitary bureaucrats in the ministry, and they had very definite ideas of what they wanted to do. Kishi asked all of Shiina's superiors, with whom both had disagreed on policy, to resign, and they did so.

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In the postwar world "respect for seniority" developed concomitantly with the tremendous expansion of the bureaucracy. It was needed to bring some definite order to the bureaucracy's internal personnel administration as well as to provide security for officials, who were significantly less well paid than before the war. As one measure of the bureaucracy's expansion, Watanabe calculates that whereas between 1894 and 1943 some 9,008 individuals passed the Higher-level (class A) Public Officials Examination, between 1948 and 1973 some 18,998 individuals did so.

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Not all bureaucrats like or approve of the system of age grading and

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forced early retirement. Sahashi has often denounced it as irrational, even though he was a past master at manipulating it. By the 1970's both the bureaucrats and the public were showing signs of irritation with the system. In 1974 an official rocked MITI by refusing to resign after he had been tapped and told it was time to go. Hayashi Shintaro *, spring class of 1947 and a Ph.D. in economics, had been chief of the Industrial Location and Environmental Protection Bureau for less than a year when he was asked to resign. Even though he had excellent job offers from private industry, he refused them on the grounds that his current work was important and that it was poor administration to change officials before they could even begin to be effective in their posts. Hayashi was liked in the ministry; he had become famous for developing the postwar Japanese sewing machine industry into a thriving export business, and he had served for several years in the JETRO office in West Germany, where he had studiedas MITI habitually puts it"how American capital overran the Western European economy."

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His refusal to resign won praise from some younger MITI officials and from the press. Nonetheless, he was reassigned to the Secretariat with no work to do and took a cut in pay. Shortly thereafter he resigned and became vice-president of Jasco Corporation, a big chain of retail stores in the Osaka and Nagoya regions.

In contrast to the views of Sahashi and Hayashi, Ojimi* Yoshihisa, a vice-minister, defends the system. He argues that strict rules of seniority and early retirement make Japan's top bureaucrats more youthful and energetic than those of other countries, and that because of their vigor they can generate more good new ideas. At the same time, the system of senior-junior (sempai-kohai*) relations, which extends beyond the period of bureaucratic service, ensures that their actions are watched by men with great experience.

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It should be added that an additional result of the system of early retirement and subsequent reemployment in big business or politics is another link between a ministry and its main clients. The practice of bureaucratic descent from heaven thus generates one more kind of factional tie among the central groups of Japanese societyfactions based on financial considerations (zaibatsu, in the nonspecific sense of the term).

As we have already seen, state bureaucrats in Japan retire early from government service and then obtain new employment in big business, public corporations, or politics. This practice is obviously open to abuse, and many Japanese commentators have charged that it has been abused. MITI reporters, for example, argue that a wise bureaucrat will use his years as a section chief to generate new ideas and put pressure on the business community to adopt them, but that as a

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bureau chief he should become submissive toward the ministry's clients with a view to enhancing his own amakudari.

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Misono* Hitoshi asserts that the combination of early retirement and inadequate pensions has made government service ''only an apprenticeship for favorable employment after retirement."

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And Takeuchi Naokazu, a disgruntled former Ministry of Agriculture bureaucrat who quit and became active in the consumer movement, charges that the Budget Bureau of the Ministry of Finance has been known to increase the budget shares of ministries that were willing to find positions for retiring finance officers in the public corporations those ministries control, or among their clients.

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Actual corruption among higher officials in Japan has occurred but is uncommon. In general, the Japanese public places greater trust in the honesty of state officials than in the honesty of politicans or business leaders. Such petty corruption as does occurgifts from businessmen, golf club fees, dinner parties, junketsis more common among noncareer officials than among the higher bureaucrats, and was more common in the period of shortages in the 1950's than in later years.

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When such incidents do involve higher officials, the press and public are quick to condemn them. For example, charges of the misuse of public funds in several public corporations and efforts to apprehend the guilty were national causes célèbres during 1979 and 1980.

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And the press and opposition parties are very watchful. The

Mainichi

, for example, reports that "toward the end of November of 1973, Nozue Chimpei, a member of the House of Councillors, conducted a unique study. He and his staff examined the trash cans at the construction and transport ministries to study how conservation policies were being carried out. After seven days of investigation, they found that the trash cans at the two ministries were filled with empty bottles of Johnny Walker and other expensive foreign liquor, and empty gift boxes bearing the names of senders."

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The serious issue in Japan is not the occasional abuse of office by a higher official but a pattern of cooperation between the government and big business that may have unintended consequences. Throughout its modern history Japan has experienced a series of major governmental corruption scandals, the most famous of which are the Siemens case of 1914, the Yawata state steel works case of 1918, the Teijin case of 1934, the Showa* Denko* case of 1948, the shipbuilding bribery case of 1954, the Tanaka "money politics" case of 1974, and the Lockheed case of 1976. These are only the most sensational; numerous others have occurred, and four resulted in the fall of governments.