century the government moved progressively away from its former policies of interference in the domestic economy (if not in those of the colonies or dependencies), and that for about thirty years an approximation of laissez faire was in vogue. Rodney Clark's observation is startling but true: 'The organization of Japanese and Western industry was probably more similar in 1910 than in 1970.'
75
MITI and modern Japanese industrial policy are genuine children of the Showa* era (1926-), and the present study is for that reason virtually coterminous with the reign of Emperor Hirohito. To carry the
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story back any further is to lose focus on the postwar economic miracle, but to fail to incorporate the history of the prewar MCI is to ignore MITI's traditions and collective consciousness. MITI men learned their trade in MCI, MM, and the Economic Stabilization Board. These were once such fearsome agencies that it was said the mere mention of their names would stop a child from crying. Admirers of the Japanese miracle such as I have a duty to show how the disastrous national experiences of the 1940's gave birth to the achievements of the 1950's and 1960's.
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Two
The Economic Bureaucracy
When the analyst discovers in the course of political research a persistent discrepancy between the stated principles and actual practices of a society, he has a strong impulse to ring the critical alarm bells to warn of a lack of legitimacy, of the operation of covert powers, or of simple hypocrisy. The end product is usually a muckraking or critical book, and the subject of Japanese politics has produced a plethora of them, by both Japanese and foreigners. I myself shall add a few items to the list of anomalies in Japanese bureaucratic life, but my purpose is not criticism. Instead, I am concerned to explain why the discrepancy between the formal authority of either the Emperor (prewar) or the Diet (postwar) and the actual powers of the state bureaucracy exists and persists, and why this discrepancy contributes to the success of the developmental state.
Japan has long displayed a marked separation in its political system between reigning and ruling, between the powers of the legislative branch and the executive branch, between the majority party and the mandarinateand, in the last analysis, between authority and power. As a result, a discrepancy exists between the constitutional and the actual locus of sovereignty that is so marked the Japanese themselves have invented terms to discuss it
(outer, in plain view) and
(inner, hidden from sight), or
(principle; Edward Seidensticker once proposed the word should be translated 'pretense') and
(actual practice).
1
Japanese and foreign observers are aware that the discrepancy generates a degree of hypocrisy or euphemism, and they often enjoy criticizing this hypocrisy. Kakuma Takashi, for example, argues that in the postwar world the business community likes to pretend that it is
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'yielding under protest' to the powers of MITI when it is actually doing nothing more than pursuing its traditional relationship with the bureaucracy.
2
Goshi* Kohei* is irritated by the senior business leaders who refer their decisions for approval to government section chiefs often not much older than their own grandchildren and then speak ill of them back at the Industrial Club.
3
Obayashi Kenji believes that the numerous 'deliberation councils' (what Berger calls 'policy councils,' or
), in which officials and entrepreneurs coordinate policies, are really covers for MITI's 'remote control' of the industrial world; and he speaks somewhat cynically of ''Japanese-style free competition.'
4
And a foreign analyst, John Campbell, shrewdly draws attention to the fact that 'nearly everyone involved with Japanese budgeting finds it in his interest to magnify the role played by the majority party.'
5
The origins of this separation between power and authority are to be found in Japan's feudal past and in the emergence of the developmental state during the Meiji era. For reasons that will be made clear in a moment, Japan in the late nineteenth century adopted for its new political system a version of what Weber called 'monarchic constitutionalism,' the form of government that Bismarck gave to imperial Germany. The Bismarckian system is described by Weber's editors as follows: 'The prime minister remained responsible to the king, not to parliament, and the army also remained under the king's control. In practice, this arrangement gave extraordinary power first to Bismarck, then to the Prussian and Imperial bureaucracy, both vis- a-vis the monarch and the parliament.'
6
Japan had some reasons of its own, in addition to Bismarck's personal influence on a few key Meiji leaders, for finding this arrangement preferable to the other models it looked at in the course of its 'modernization.' One of the most serious consequences for Japan of adopting this system was its decision in 1941 to go to war with the United States and Great Britaina decision in which neither the monarch nor the parliament participated. But what is perhaps most important more than a generation after the Pacific War is that the system persisted and became even stronger, even though it was formally abolished by the Constitution of 1947.
The ancestors of the modern Japanese bureaucrats are the samurai of the feudal era. During the two-and-a-half centuries of peace that the Tokugawa shogunate enforced, the feudal warriors slowly evolved into what one group of scholars
