SOURCE
: Watanabe Yasuo, 'Komuin * no kyaria' (Careers of officials), in Tsuji Kiyoaki, ed.,
(Lectures on the science of administration), Tokyo, 1976, 4: 191.
NOTE
: The economic ministries recruited spring (I) and autumn (II) classes during 1947 and 1948 to meet their expanded duties under economic control.
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sure from new entering classes advancing from below, and the usual retirement age for the vice-minister himself is slightly over 50. The practice is dictated by the rigid seniority system of the bureaucracy, but as we shall explain below, it has been turned to the advantage of the state as another very important channel of communication with the society.
The process of separating out those who will resign early and those who will stay in the ministry is called
(the tap on the shoulder) or
(thinning out). It is the responsibility of the vice-minister and the chief of the Secretariat, who are also responsible for finding the soon-to-be-retired officials good new positions on boards of directors. The final weeding out comes at the vice-ministerial level, when one man from one class is chosen by the outgoing vice-minister as his own replacement and when all the new vice-minister's classmates must resign to insure that he has absolute seniority in the ministry. The new vice-minister in turn devotes his efforts to seeing that these high-ranking retirees (and fellow classmates) get good amakudari landing spots. New positions for retiring vice-ministers are found for them by the minister and by the ministry's elder statesmen (sempai).
Competition in the maneuvering for high positions in a ministry normally occurs among classes and not individuals. For example, the 25 members of the class of May 1947 in the Ministry of Finance organized themselves as a club, the Satsuki Kai (May Club), which continued in amity for 31 years until 1978, when it had only one member left, Okura * Masataka, the director of the Tax Bureau.
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Even if not formally organized as a club, a class will sometimes meet and caucus as a body during periods of stress within a ministry in order to agree on common policies (the various classes in MITI met separately in 1963, at the time of Sahashi's initial failure to be appointed vice-minister, one of the big crises in MITI history, which I shall describe fully in Chapter 7).
Not every class can produce a vice-minister; if it did he could occupy the office for only a few months, which would greatly damage the effectiveness of a ministry's chief executive officer. Therefore, some classes have to be passed over. As a result of this factor, a chief of personnel in the Secretariat will sometimes attempt to remove promising members of rival classes from the competition in order to keep his own class in the running. Many of Sahashi's opponents have accused him of using his years as the personnel section chief to rig the succession. Whatever the case, the classes of 1935 and 1936, which lay between that of the outgoing vice-minister (1934) and Sahashi's own
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(1937), found their members all occupying terminal positions. The 'loser years' in MITI were 1935, 1936, 1938, and 1942.
Each class has its 'flowers' (
)that is, candidates with strong credentials for the vice-ministershipand members of the class take pride in one of their comrades representing them at the top. For example, the
*
(flowers of the class of 1943) at MITI were Sho* Kiyoshi, Yajima Shiro*, Miyake Yukio, and Yamashita Eimei. During 1973 Sho ended his MITI career as director-general of the Medium and Smaller Enterprises Agency, Miyake as director-general of the Patent Agency, Yajima as chief of the Heavy Industries Bureau, and Yamashita made it to the top as MITI vice-minister from July 1973 to November 1974. Needless to say, when one class produces two vice-ministersas happened twice in MITI (Ishihara Takeo and Ueno Koshichi*, both of the class of 1932, succeeded each other as vice-minister between 1955 and 1960; and Imai Zen'ei and Sahashi Shigeru, both of the class of 1937, succeeded each other as vice-minister between 1963 and 1966)great strains are imposed on the internal norms of ministerial life.
Before the war age grading existed, but it was not as rigorously enforced as after the war. When Yoshino Shinji (class of 1913) became vice-minister of the Ministry of Commerce and Industry in 1931 (he served in that office until 1936), he was only 43 years old and was promoted over several of his seniors. Moreover, at his personal request, one of his seniors (Nakamatsu Shinkyo*, class of 1908) remained on in the ministry as chief of the Patent Bureau for another five years. Within MITI the practice of all classmates or seniors resigning when a new vice-minister takes over appears to have originated in October 1941, when Kishi became minister and appointed Shiina vice-minister. Kishi and Shiina represented the Manchurian faction of promilitary bureaucrats in the ministry, and they had very definite ideas of what they wanted to do. Kishi asked all of Shiina's superiors, with whom both had disagreed on policy, to resign, and they did so.
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In the postwar world 'respect for seniority' developed concomitantly with the tremendous expansion of the bureaucracy. It was needed to bring some definite order to the bureaucracy's internal personnel administration as well as to provide security for officials, who were significantly less well paid than before the war. As one measure of the bureaucracy's expansion, Watanabe calculates that whereas between 1894 and 1943 some 9,008 individuals passed the Higher-level (class A) Public Officials Examination, between 1948 and 1973 some 18,998 individuals did so.
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Not all bureaucrats like or approve of the system of age grading and
