networkForeign Affairs through the regular foreign office cable system, Finance through the telex system of the Bank of Tokyo, and MITI through the telex system of JETRO. According to the
, Japan actually has three foreign services, each of them with different policies and each represented overseas. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs is the most internationalist, MITI has historically been protectionist, and the Finance Ministry is fairly internationalist but stingy about spending money for defense or foreign aid. Policy is a result of compromises among these positions, and the compromises change as the power positions of the three ministries shift with political developments.
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The headquarters of a ministry engaged in interministerial struggles is, of course, its home office in the Kasumigaseki district of Tokyo. But in addition to its home office staff and its various old boy networks, client organizations, deliberation councils, and public corporations, each ministry has 'assets' (
) spread throughout the government in the form of transferees, or what the French call
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. The old-line ministries engage in a relentless contest to capture and control the more vulnerable agencies of the government through the sending of
. Their primary targets are the independent agencies attached to the prime minister's office, each of which is headed by an appointed minister of state (
): The Defense Agency, the Economic Planning Agency, the Science and Technology Agency, the Environment Agency, the National Land Agency, and a few others. The transferees who staff these agencies make up what the press calls expeditionary armies, which are quite regularly committed by their ministries to the 'battles for the outposts' that are a serious part of the Japanese policy-making process.
The case of the Economic Planning Agency (EPA) has been the most widely studied and reported.
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Suffice it to say that MITI and the Ministry of Finance both hold strong positions at the EPAMITI controls its vice-ministership (since the 1960's a prestigious terminal appointment within the MITI personnel hierarchy) and the head of its Coordination Bureau, together with several section chief positions; Finance names its chief secretary and some important section chiefs. The positions MITI controls are valuable to it because through them it is able to place its own representatives on the Bank of Japan's Policy Board and on the deliberation council that supervises the Ministry of Finance's trust fund accounts, which are used to fund the investment budget.
As for the EPA itself, it has come to be known as a 'colony agency,' or a 'branch store of MITI.' It has no operating functions, but only writes reportshence its other nickname of the 'composition agency.'
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EPA's forecasts and indicative plans are read not so much for their accuracy or econometric sophistication as for official statements of what industries the government is prepared to finance or guarantee for the immediate future. Some Japanese economists believe that it is precisely this EPA function of indicating the government's intentions regarding the economy that gives rise to the 'typically Japanese phenomenon' of excessive competition: excessive competition does not exist in all industries but only in those industries in which the government has expressed an interestand in which, as a result, the risks are greatly reduced.
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However, the quality of the EPA's main product, the annual Economic White Paper, has been affected by its colony status: in 1970 MITI prevented it from saying that the Yawata-Fuji steel merger (which produced New Japan Steel) could lead to monopolistic price increases, and in 1971 the Finance Ministry stopped any mention of the inflationary effects of the Bank of Japan's dollar buying following the Nixon shocks.
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The Defense Agency illustrates a different facet of the struggle for the outposts. Japan's postwar armed forces originated late in the occupation era as the National Police Reserve Force; in 1954 the Police Reserve was expanded, placed under the newly created Defense Agency, and renamed the Self-Defense Forces. In the same year a new national Police Agency was established. Since the civilian leaders of the Police Reserve had come from the old Home Ministry line of descent, and since the new Police Agency inherited the old Home Ministry's national police functions, it was natural that the Police Agency should continue supplying the civilian bureaucrats to staff the new Defense Agency. The first chief of the Police Reserve and the first vice-minister of the Defense Agency was Masuhara Keikichi, who held the post from August 1952 to June 1957. Masuhara was an old Home Ministry bureaucrat (Todai * law, 1928; chief of the Yamagata prefectural police in 1940). The top positions in the uniformed service of Japan's new armed forces went to former military officers, but until the 1970's all the top Defense executive positions were held by Police Agency transferees.
However, the Police Agency ran into trouble holding on to its bureaucratic turf because its predecessors did not recruit many new officials during the key class years of 1948 to 1952. The Ministry of Finance, on the other hand, took in about 50 successful examinees in 1947 and 1948 each, and from 40 to 50 during each of the years 194953. By the middle of the 1970's the Finance Ministry was under heavy pressure to find positions for some of these now high-ranking officials, and the Defense Agency looked promising. In June 1974 the Finance Ministry finally succeeded in placing Tashiro Kazumasa, formerly of the Finance Ministry's Secretariat, as the vice-minister of defense. Even though defense issues were becoming increasingly important to the Japanese during the 1970's, the Defense Agency itself was preoccupied by the Police-Finance struggle. The real losers in this fight, as at the EPA, were the pure defense bureaucrats, those who went to the Defense Agency directly from the university.
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