Chalmers Johnson - MITI and the Japanese miracle

everything

if it so chose.

35

The 1937 trade law is the clearest precedent for the Foreign Exchange and Foreign Trade Control Law of 1949, which was MITI's single most powerful instrument for carrying out its industrial policy during the period of high-speed growth and into the present (the 1949 law was rewritten but still retained on the books during 1980).

Yoshino and MCI, who clearly had not thought through all the implications of this law, regarded it primarily as an emergency wartime measure. At the same time, however, other segments of the government were moving toward a planned and state-controlled economy. As MITI's semiofficial

History of Commercial and Industrial Policy

(

Shoko

*

seisaku shi

) notes, "In terms of wartime economic controls, the most

Page 137

important administrative change after the outbreak of the China Incident took place outside MCI; this was the establishment on October 23, 1937, of the Cabinet Planning Board (Kikaku-in)."

36

On May 14, 1937, as a preparatory step toward planning and state control, the Hayashi cabinet had reorganized and strengthened the Cabinet Research Bureau of 1935 and renamed it the Cabinet Planning Agency (Kikaku-cho*). When the Konoe government took office in the following month, it decided to merge the military research unit of 1927 (the Resources Bureau) and the Planning Agency into a new and very powerful organ that would, in theory, command and coordinate the activities of the various ministries. This was the Cabinet Planning Board (CPB). It brought together military officers, detached reform bureaucrats, planners from Manchuria, and (unwittingly) some of the leading Marxist economists of the time into what was hailed as the "economic general staff." It is directly relevant to the history of MITI for several reasons. First, many MCI officials worked there (or, alternatively, many former CPB officials entered MCI after the war). Second, it was merged in 1943 with MCI to create the Ministry of Munitions. And third, it is the precedent for the postwar Economic Stabilization Board and Economic Planning Agency, both of which MITI has either strongly influenced or dominated. Most important, the CPB's method of planning necessitated the reorganization of MCI into industry-specific bureaus, and these were perpetuated in MITI until 1973.

When first set up, the CPB was divided into six departments: general affairs, domestic plans, financial plans, industrial plans (Uemura Kogoro* was the first head of this department), communications plans, and research. In 1939, after the dismal failure of its first efforts at economic planning, the CPB was reorganized into a secretariat, first department (general policy for the expansion of national strength), second department (overall mobilization), third department (labor and civilian mobilization), fourth department ("materials mobilization plans" and "expansion of production plans"), fifth department (trade and finance), sixth department (transportation and communications), and seventh department (science and technology). It underwent several more minor changes in later years (the fourth department, for example, was merged with the second department). Prince Konoe named his old professor of law at Kyoto University, Taki Masao, to be the first president of the CPB, but subsequent presidents and vice-presidents were reform bureaucrats or military officers (see Table 9). The CPB's initial staff consisted of 116 career officials, technicians, and temporarily attached specialists.

Page 138

TABLE

9

Leaders of the Cabinet Planning Board, October 23, 1937October 31, 1943

Cabinet

President and vice-president of board

Remarks

First Konoe 10/371/39

Taki Masao

Postwar member of the House of Representatives of the Diet.

Aoki Kazuo

Finance bureaucrat. Minister of finance, Abe cabinet. Ambassador to Nanking, 1940. Minister of greater East Asia, Tojo * cabinet. Postwar member of House of Councillors, Diet.

Hiranuma

1/398/39

Aoki Kazuo

Takebe Rokuzo*

See above.

Home ministry bureaucrat. Director, General Affairs Agency, Manchukuo, 194045. Prisoner in USSR, 194556.

Abe

8/391/40

Aoki Kazuo

Takebe Rokuzo

Concurrently finance minister.

See above.

Yonai

1/407/40

Takeuchi Kakichi

Uemura Kogoro*

MCI bureaucrat.

Postwar chairman, Fuji Television, Japan Airlines. President of Keidanren, 1968.

Second Konoe 7/404/41

Hoshino Naoki

Finance bureaucrat. Chief cabinet secretary, Tojo cabinet.

Obata Tadayoshi

Sumitomo zaibatsu.

Second Konoe 4/417/41

Suzuki Teiichi

Lt. General. Convicted class A war criminal. Released 1956.

Miyamoto Takenosuke

Home ministry bureaucrat. Engineer.

Third Konoe 7/4110/41

Suzuki Teiichi

Abe Genki

See above.

Home ministry bureaucrat.

Former chief, Special Higher Police. Lost election as LDP candidate for House of Councillors, 1956.

Tojo

10/4110/43

Suzuki Teiichi

Abe Genki

See above.

See above.

NOTE

: On December 6, 1940, in the second Konoe cabinet, the president of the CPB was given cabinet-level rank as a minister of state (

kokumu daijin

).

Page 139

The most famous product of the CPB was the National General Mobilization Law (Kokka Sodoin * Ho*, law number 55, introduced in the Diet on February 24, 1938, passed April 1, 1938, and put into effect May 5, 1938). It was more than an economic law. It was intended as a replacement for the munitions law of 1918, but it actually authorized the complete reorganization of the society along totalitarian lines. According to Murase, its drafter was Uemura Kogoro*.

37

Despite the law's scope, its 50 articles contain very few concrete rules or stipulations. All details of implementation were left to Imperial ordinances, which the bureaucracy could issue on its own initiative without reference to the Diet. The law, in fact, became a carte blanche for the executive branch to do anything that it and its various clients could agree on; its policies extended not just to industry and the economy but also to education, labor, finance, publishing, and virtually all social activities even remotely related to the war effort.

38

The Diet vigorously debated the mobilization law. Leaders of the new zaibatsu approved it, even though they did not like controls, because it signaled more business for them. The old zaibatsu and independent business leaders raised numerous objections and demanded a say in the ordinances that would implement the law (this they received), but they were quieted during 1938 with assurances that the China Incident would end soon, or they were shouted down by military spokesmen in the Diet chambers. Some economic leaders seemed to imply that a façade of civilian control should be maintained in order to prolong friendly trading relations with the United States and Great Britain, to which the military agreed, and dividends on equity shares continued to be paid until virtually the end of the Pacific War, when the zaibatsu no longer objected to the nationalization of their destroyed factories. These zaibatsu ownership rights turned out to be virtually the only civilian rights that were respected throughout the wartime period.