conditions is both complex and paradoxical. On the one hand, the responsibility for the war clearly must be placed on the bureaucracy, as well as on the military and the zaibatsu. From the outbreak of the war through its unfolding to the end, we know that the bureaucracy's influence was great and that it was evil. Many people have already censured the bureaucrats for their responsibility and their sins. On the other hand, given that under the present circumstances of defeat it is impossible to return to a laissez-faire economy, and that every aspect of economic life necessarily requires an expansion of planning and control, the functions and significance of the bureaucracy are expanding with each passing day. It is not possible to imagine the dissolution of the bureaucracy in the same sense as the dissolution of the military or the zaibatsu, since the bureaucracy as a concentration of technical expertise must grow as the administrative sector broadens and becomes more complex.
32
It was not just a matter of an increase in the number of tasks for the bureaucracy; even more important was SCAP's insistence that economic functions previously shared between the government and the zaibatsu should now be placed exclusively in governmental hands. As we shall see in Chapter 4, this was a development that the prewar bureaucracy had fought for with passionate enthusiasm but had
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never achieved due to the resistance of the private sector. Tsuji thinks that SCAP never fully appreciated the implications of what it was doing when it forced the transfer of the zaibatsu's share of power to the government because SCAP, in accordance with American governmental theory, regarded the bureaucracy as a 'nonpolitical instrument,' not a political body. Moreover, SCAP was itself an official bureaucratic organizationthe U.S. Armyand disinclined to question institutions comparably based on professional, if not necessarily politically accountable, service to the nation.
The second reason for the expansion of bureaucratic influence was the relative incompetence of the political forces SCAP had fostered to replace the old order. Cadres of the old political parties brought again to leadership of the government by the new constitution had never (or not for almost twenty years) exercised political power. Moreover, some of the most competent among them had been purged. The American-style tradition in which party leaders become deeply involved in administrative affairs and the drafting of legislation had never been well established in Japan in any case. Under the Katayama government, created on May 24, 1947, the cabinet ministers were so lacking in expertise and so unfamiliar with legislation that everyone had his vice-minister sitting next to him in the cabinet room in order to advise him on what to do.
33
This state of affairs ended in January 1949 with the establishment of the third Yoshida government. Yoshida Shigeru (18781967) was himself a former high-ranking bureaucrat of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and he established the 'bureaucratic leadership structure' (
*
*
) that has formed the mainstream of Japanese politics to the present day.
The twenty-fourth general election of January 1949 brought into the Diet 42 new members who were former bureaucrats; in most cases they were also proteges and allies of Yoshida, who had encouraged them to run. Among this new class of politicians were Ikeda Hayato (18991965), recently retired as vice-minister of finance, who became Yoshida's new finance minister, and Sato* Eisaku (19011975), recently retired as vice-minister of transportation and soon to become chief secretary of Yoshida's Liberal Party. Shortly before the election, on December 24, 1948, Kishi Nobusuke (b. 1896) was released from Sugamo Prison as an unindicted class A war criminal. He had served as vice-minister of commerce and industry under the Abe, Yonai, and Konoe cabinets and as minister of commerce and industry and viceminister of munitions in the Tojo* cabinet. On April 29, 1952, he was depurged, and a year later he was also elected to the Diet. These three
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former bureaucrats, each of whom had had a full and very successful career in his respective ministry, dominated Japanese politics from 1957 to 1972: Kishi was prime minister from February 1957 to July 1960, Ikeda from July 1960 to November 1964, and Sato * from November 1964 to July 1972. Yoshida himself, a former vice-minister of foreign affairs and ambassador to Great Britain, served as prime minister from May 1946 to May 1947 and from October 1948 to December 1954.
In addition to these leaders, many middle-ranking Diet members were also drawn from the ranks of state officialdom. In 1946 Liberal Party (conservative) ex-bureaucrat Diet members accounted for only 2.7 percent of the total. Yoshida raised the number to 18.2 percent in 1949, and this proportion has held firm ever since. As of 1970, 69 members of the House of Representatives (23 percent) and 50 members of the House of Councillors (37 percent) were ex-bureaucrats belonging to the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP). In 1977 the respective figures were 27 percent and 35 percent.
34
Party politicians holding a safe electoral base (
) in one of the prefectural constituencies did not take this intrusion of bureaucrats with equanimity. Many of them believed, and still believe today, that bureaucrats were not so much becoming politicians as they were displacing politicians and contributing to a dangerous blurring of functions between the executive and legislative branches. In the election of October 1952 approximately 40 percent of some 329 prewar and wartime politicians recently released from the ban against their holding public office were reelected to the Diet. They held about 30 percent of the seats. From that point on, the main configuration of postwar Diet politics was established: the so- called mainstream of the conservative forces was occupied by retired bureaucrats, and the antimainstream by old (later called 'pure') politicians who did not come from a background in the state apparatus. In 1955 the two main conservative parties, successors to the Seiyukai* and Minseito* of the prewar era, united in order to confront the growing strength of the opposition socialists. They created the huge coalition Liberal Democratic Party that has controlled the Diet without interruption ever since.
Within the LDP the bureaucratic mainstream and the party politicians' (
*) antimainstream factions compete with each other, with the bureaucrats usually dominant; but for the sake of party unity neither group is ever totally excluded. The second Kishi cabinet of 1958 established bureaucratic supremacy when eight of the twelve ministries were headed by ex-bureaucrats. Former bureaucrats also held many influential positions in the party's Policy Affairs Research Council and on the key standing committees of the Diet, where the plans
