27
Since SCAP had decided on an indirect occupation, which left the Japanese government intact even if taking orders from SCAP, the Allies did not demand a reform of all ministries, only those that had been closely connected with the military or the police (one was the Home Ministry), which the occupation ordered abolished. SCAP intended to deal on an individual basis with those bureaucrats whom it held responsible for the warthrough the purge rather than through structural change. But as we saw in Chapter 2, recent Japanese estimates put the number of MCI officials who were actually purged at only 42; and according to SCAP's own figures, it investigated 69 MCI officials but removed from office only 10.
28
Thus Shiina's last-minute ploy worked quite well; the trade and industry bureaucracy maintained its continuity despite the crisis of defeat.
The accounts of what happened during the four years from mid-1945 to mid-1949 in the realm of economic and industrial policywhether by SCAP officials or Japaneseoften differ so markedly as to make it appear that each side is talking about a different country. SCAP began the occupation by declaring that the Japanese had brought about their own economic difficulties and that the Allies therefore took no responsibility for maintaining any particular level of living in Japan. However, the Americans quickly discovered that if they stuck to this positiongiven the collapse of all Japanese international tradethey would merely ensure a communist revolution in Japan and not a 'democratically reoriented' country.
29
The Americans therefore began state-controlled trade and demanded that the Japanese government impose economic controls. As it turned out, the prewar and wartime victories of the zaibatsu over the state-control bureaucrats proved to be the zaibatsu's undoing. SCAP declared that the zaibatsu had been responsible for the war economy, banned any further private cartels, and ordered government officials to exercise the powers previously reserved for the control associations. MCI officials of the 'Kishi-Shiina line' were only too happy to oblige; after their struggles of the previous fifteen years, it suddenly seemed as if they had arrived in the bureaucratic promised land.
Similarly, with regard to emergency economic rehabilitation measures or positive economic reforms, the Japanese and the Americans often seemed purposely to misunderstand each other. Yoshida Shigeru (18781967), the great ex-bureaucrat prime minister who presided over Japan's rise from the ashes, once commented, 'The occupation, with all the power and authority behind its operation, was
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hampered by its lack of knowledge of the people it had come to govern, and even more so, perhaps, by its generally happy ignorance of the amount of requisite knowledge it lacked.
*
Thus SCAP would sometimes approve of MCI proposals that the Americans thought were temporary expedients but that ended up lasting until well into the 1960's (foreign exchange budgets, for example). As for SCAP's policies calling for zaibatsu dissolution, the officials of MCI's old Enterprises Bureaunow called the Readjustment Department (Seiri Bu)administered this program with enthusiasm. But when it came to economic deconcentration generally, toward which the breakup of the zaibatsu was only a means and not an end, the industrial bureaucrats quickly discovered that there were divisions within SCAP and took advantage of them. Eleanor Hadley, herself a SCAP trustbuster, explains:
Inasmuch as in the United States commercial banks are not permitted to have industrial and trading subsidiaries or affiliates, the American vocabulary and way of thinking is to regard commercial banking as quite separate from industry and commerce. . . . The Economic and Scientific Section of [SCAP] Headquarters . . . was set up with an Antitrust and Cartel Division and a Finance Division, which was a mistake. . . . The result of the actual arrangement was that the Antitrust and Cartel Division claimed jurisdiction in antitrust matters over the banks, but the staff of the Finance Division insisted that the banks were entirely theirs (and their responsibility included no antitrust assignment!).
31
After the occupation the old zaibatsu were recreated on the basis of their banks rather than their former family holding companies. This was a much more rational and effective arrangement, but it is certain that this was not exactly what SCAP had in mind. In fact, in 1975, with no apparent sense of irony, the Japanese government awarded its Second Class Order of the Sacred Treasure to Tristan E. Beplat, who had recently retired as a senior vice-president of the Manufacturers Hanover Trust Company of New York. As the
explained, Beplat was 'an American banker who the government said
*
See
, p. 128. However, Yoshida himself was not above attempting to fool SCAP officials. 'The original GHQ plan, as handed to us,' Yoshida writes, 'called for the purging of 'standing directors' as well as others occupying top positions. This was translated into Japanese by our side as 'managing directors.' Strictly speaking, however, a 'standing director' could be interpreted as one who functioned regularly in a company, which would have included most ordinary directors. We held to our interpretation that 'standing directors' were, in fact, managing directors, and by so doing were able to save many ordinary directors who might otherwise have been so classified from the purge. Which shows that upon occasion mistranslations serve their turn.'
, pp. 15556. The issue here is the translation of the difficult terms
(executive director),
*
(managing director), and
