other reason than that the chief executives of the new company, including Ojima Arakazu, Inayama Yoshihiro, Hirai Tomisaburo, and Tokunaga Hisatsugu, were all former MCI or MITI officials. Because of this and several other issues that came to a head at precisely the same time that the steel case ended up in court, MITI was subjected to some of the most withering criticism it had ever endured in its long history. The contemporaneous foreign criticism of the ministryJames Abegglen's term 'Japan, Inc.' and the London
's references to 'notorious MITI'never fazed MITI officials, but domestic criticism was taken seriously. The main issues raised by domestic critics, in addition to the steel merger, were environmental damage, overcrowding, alleged collusion with big business, and a host of other side effects of high-speed growth that the public demanded be addressed. And as if this were not enough, right in the midst of all these problems the ministry experienced the most serious revolt ever against its administrative guidance, a blow that signified a genuine turning point in its relations with big business.
The issue of industrial pollution and environmental damage had numerous facets. At its worst it referred to the appearance of the Minamata and
'diseases,' caused respectively by mercury poisoning of the waters around Minamata village in Kumamoto prefecture by the Chisso Fertilizer Company and cadmium poisoning in Toyama prefecture and other locations. (In September 1969 the chief of the Tokyo Mine Safety Office, a division of MITI, committed suicide when cadmium contamination was confirmed in Gunma prefecture.)
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Only slightly less serious was the so-called Yokkaichi asthma
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that seemed to afflict everyone in the big petrochemical complexes at Yokkaichi and Tokuyama. As the press revealed, many of these conditions had actually been diagnosed as early as 1955 but had elicited no governmental corrective measures. The blame was laid squarely at MITI's door.
More politically significant because they affected so many people were air pollution in all the major cities (it was predicted that a chic, well-designed gas mask would soon become as indispensable an item of personal daily use as the umbrella), and automobile and truck accidents (because of inadequate expenditures on highways and alleged insensitivity to safety in automobile design). Noise, crowding, and the shortage of land for housing in the big cities also led many to question the value of high-speed growth. Organizations of local residents and consumers were created to protect such things as ''sunshine rights,' that is, the right of a resident not to have all sunshine blocked by an intervening high-rise. The word
* ('pollution,' or more literally, 'public wound') appeared in the newspapers every day.
During 1967 the Diet enacted the Pollution Countermeasures Basic Law (Kogai* Taisaku Kihon Ho, number 132 of August 3), which set standards for seven kinds of pollution: air, water, soil (added in 1970), noise, vibration, subsidence, and offensive odors. However, on MITI's insistence the Diet modified article 1 of the Ministry of Welfare's draft law to add that antipollution measures must be 'in harmony with the healthy development of the economy.'
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This effectively gutted the law. But as pollution problems intensified, the politicians ultimately had no choice but to overrule the ministry. The result was the famous 'pollution Diet' (
, the 64th session, November 24 to December 18, 1970), which passed some fourteen antipollution laws and removed the phrase 'in harmony with the economy' from the basic law. MITI had finally gotten the point; on July 1, 1970, it renamed its Mine Safety Bureau the Environmental Protection and Safety Bureau (Kogai Hoan Kyoku) and increased its budget for dealing with industrial pollution problems from ?274 million (1970) to ?638 million (1971). A decade later MITI was to be credited with carrying out one of the most effective industrial cleanup campaigns in history, and in the process it also developed a thriving new industry in antipollution devices.
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But in 1970 no one was thanking it, nor did many think that it could do the job.
In addition to being held responsible for the pollution problem, MITI was also blamed for damaging relations with the United States.
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The Nixon administration, elected in 1968, was publicly committed to obtaining limitations on Japanese exports of synthetic textiles to America, just as the Kennedy administration had earlier negotiated an 'orderly marketing agreement' covering cotton textiles. Both administrations were responding to political demands from the American Textile Manufacturers Institute, who used the potent argument that imports were putting many of the blacks among their employees out of work. (It should be noted that Japan has consistently and successfully prohibited imports of leather goods on the grounds that these would compete with the domestic industries of the
, a dispossessed minority in Japanese society.)
Nixon thought he could arrange a quid pro quo since Prime Minister Sato * had made a major political issue out of the return of Okinawa. At the Sato-Nixon* summit conference in Washington (November 1920, 1969) Nixon agreed to the precise terms Sato wanted for the return of Okinawa (without nuclear weapons), in return for which he thought he had received a promise from Sato to bring synthetic textile exports under control. The Japanese press also thought so, since it invented the slogan
('selling thread to buy rope,' meaning 'trading textiles for Oki
') to characterize Sato's* diplomacy toward the United States.
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Sato, as it turned out, could not deliver on his promise because of obstruction by both the textile industry and MITI. From September 15 to 19, 1969, a MITI on-site inspection team
