retrospect, with the onset of liberalization and MITI's response to it. The people whom Sahashi advanced and who in turn helped him were all acknowledged to be the leaders of heavy and chemical industrialization, at the time the basic policy that was widely supported throughout the ministry.
Just before Ishihara Takeo retired as vice-minister in June 1957, he asked Sahashi what post he would like in the ministry in return for his long and effective service as personnel officer. Sahashi chose deputy director of the Heavy Industries Bureau, which was just then at the peak of its influence and also the most old-fashioned bureau in the ministry. The Heavy Industries Bureau had jurisdiction over both the nurturing and the export sales of steel, machine tools, general machinery, automobiles, electronics, heavy electrical equipment, rolling stock, and aviation productsand over the industries that turned them out. Machines in general were beginning to occupy a commanding share of Japan's high-value-added exports, and its enterprises were also among the leading investors in all domestic industry. The Heavy Industries Bureau was at the cutting edge of the Kishi-Shiina line (and, it should also be noted, Kishi was prime minister from 1957 to 1960, Shiina MITI minister from 1960 to 1961). Sahashi had chosen well.
Among his many duties Sahashi had to deal with the steel industry. One of his first achievements was setting up a price maintenance cartel for steel in 1958 and getting it approved by the Fair Trade Commission. This type of work was not difficult for a MITI officer. Steel had been a government enterprise for half of the twentieth century, and
Page 246
most of the people Sahashi dealt with were either his ministerial seniors or industrialists he had known since his wartime work in the Iron and Steel Section of the Munitions Ministry. They included Ojima Arakazu, Kishi's successor as vice-minister in 1941 and subsequently president of Yawata Steel, one of the two successor companies to Japan Steel after SCAP had broken it up; Inayama Yoshihiro, who had entered MCI in 1927 as an official at the then state-owned Yawata works and who in 1962 followed Ojima as president of Yawata Steel; Nagano Shigeo, president of Fuji Steel, the other successor of old Japan Steel, and a man who had worked with Sahashi in the wartime Iron and Steel Control Association; Fujii Heigo, a Yawata vice-president and a man who came to Sahashi's aid in his clash a few years later with the non- state-oriented Sumitomo Metals Company; and Hirai Tomisaburo *, a Yawata director and the vice-minister who had appointed Sahashi to the Secretarial Section in 1954. Ojima would soon be playing a key role in MITI's affairs as head of the new Industrial Structure Investigation Council, the ministry's blue-ribbon committee for thinking of ways to counter the effects of liberalization. Sahashi's relations with the Yawata and Fuji steel companies were cordialso cordial that when he was vice-minister, leaders of Sumitomo Metals would charge that MITI had become the 'Kasumigaseki office of Yawata Steel.'
4
Not so cordial were Sahashi's relations with the International Business Machines Corporation. The IBM case did, however, afford him one of his first opportunities to appear as a samurai warding off the 'invasion of American capital.' MITI already had various policies intended to exclude foreign enterprises from the Japanese domestic marketinformal rules such as not allowing foreigners more than a 50 percent share in a joint venture, restricting the number and voting rights of foreigners on the boards of directors of Japanese firms, stopping foreigners from buying Japanese firms without the firm's consentand, ultimately, excluding all foreign participation in the Japanese economy without MITI's permission. In a sensational case of the late 1950's, the Heavy Industries Bureau had done everything in its power to obstruct a proposed joint venture between Singer Sewing Machines of the United States and Pine Sewing Machines of Japan. Singer, the prewar leader, was attempting to recapture its old markets, but MITI was fostering a domestic sewing-machine industry, and so it slapped production limitations on the Singer-Pine collaboration.
5
IBM, however, posed special problems. Since it had organized itself in Japan as a yen-based company, MITI's controls over the use or repatriation of foreign exchange did not apply. More important, IBM
Page 247
held all the basic patents on computer technology, which effectively blocked the development of a Japanese computer industry.
Sahashi wanted IBM's patents and made no bones about it. In as forthright a manner as possible, he made his position clear to IBM-Japan: 'We will take every measure possible to obstruct the success of your business unless you license IBM patents to Japanese firms and charge them no more than a 5 percent royalty.'
6
In one of his negotiating sessions, Sahashi proudly recalls, he said that 'we do not have an inferiority complex toward you; we only need time and money to compete effectively.'
7
IBM ultimately had to come to terms. It sold its patents and accepted MITI's administrative guidance over the number of computers it could market domestically as conditions for manufacturing in Japan. Since IBM leased its machines rather than selling them outright, in 1961 Sahashi responded by setting up a semiofficial Japan Electronic Computer Company, financed by the Development Bank, to buy hardware from domestic producers and lease it to customers. To ensure MITI's control, he appointed the old MCI senior, Murase Naokai, president of the leasing company.
Sahashi's vigorous industrial xenophobia made him quite popular with many industrialists, but in another realm of his official activitiesrelations with the political worldhe was not nearly so clever or perceptive an operator as he had been vis-a-vis IBM. Ever since the creation in 1955 of the Liberal Democratic Party, politicians slowly had been rising in power as rivals to the bureaucrats, although the bureaucrats were not fully attuned to what was happening. First the military bureaucrats and then the economic bureaucrats had dominated Japanese government from 1932 to at least 1955. From around 1960, however, a milieu comparable to the one that Yoshino Shinji had worked in during the 1920's began to reappear; the new politicians were much more dependent on the bureaucracy than they had been in the earlier period, but on the other hand they had much stronger constitutional powers than before. The bureaucrats were lulled because after Ishibashi's untimely resignation in 1957 because of illness, his successors as prime minister had all been famous ex-bureaucratsKishi, Ikeda, and Sato*.
*
However, even Ikeda and Sato had to pay attention to the political process; they were not merely for-
*
Some Japanese political analysts lament the control from 1957 to 1972 of the prime ministership by former bureaucrats. They comment rather wanly that if only Ishibashi had worn an overcoat on the February day in 1957 when he attended an outdoor celebration at his alma mater, Waseda University, the political history of postwar Japan might have been quite different. See
, Political Department,
