building until 1934.
The creation of Yawata was the single most important achievement of MAC, but the inspiration came from the oligarchs and the military. The daily life of the ministry was always dominated by agricultural affairs. This was only natural since Japan was still predominantly an agricultural country. As late as 1914 agriculture accounted for 45.1 percent of the total national product and fishing for another 5.1 percent, while mining contributed 5.1 percent and manufacturing 44.5 percent. Manufacturing was still concentrated overwhelmingly in such light industries as textiles and foodstuffs; heavy industrymetals, machines, chemicals, and fuelsdid not comprise more than half of all manufacturing until the 193337 period.
9
The ministry's internal organization reflected these proportions. From before World War I newcomers to the ministry had informally divided themselves into an agricultural career path (
*
*) and a commercial and industrial career path (
*
), although they often switched back and forth between each other's bureaus. The arrival after the turn of the century of the first graduates of Tokyo University Law School strengthened this separation. Technical agronomists had dominated the agricultural wing of the ministry from its
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early days, and law graduates felt at a disadvantage in competing with them in the agricultural career path. They therefore clustered in commercial and industrial administration.
There was not much work for them to do there, however. Before World War I commercial affairs and industrial affairs were always subordinate to the Agricultural Affairs Bureau, and they were regularly combined into one Commercial and Industrial Bureau (Shoko * Kyoku) as an economy measure. They were finally separated into two bureaus only in May 1919. The chief commercial function of MAC was supervising the insurance companies, the stock and commodity exchanges, and the warehousing businessall sectors of the economy that the commercial wing of the ministry would lose to other agencies by the time of the Pacific War. Industrial administration was almost nonexistent. Since the Matsukata reforms, and particularly after the creation of the Diet and the end of the 189495 war with China, the government's overall policy toward industry and foreign trade had become a more or less orthodox version of laissez faire. Even when MAC tried to take some initiative in the industrial arena, its ties with industrial leaders were weak, except for the personal relations between the oligarchs and the zaibatsu, and industrialists commonly ignored what government bureaucrats had to say.
10
In any case the biggest industries were the cotton textile firms of Osaka, and they were fiercely independent and suspicious of Tokyo.
When Yamamoto Tatsuo of the Mitsubishi zaibatsu became minister of MAC in 1913, he undertook to strengthen the commercial and industrial side of the administration. With a few notable exceptions, most of its officials still represented the lingering influence of Satsuma and Choshu* retainers in the state bureaucracy. The first vice-ministers from among government service examinees did not reach the top in any ministry until 1912. In retrospect Yamamoto's most important accomplishment was the recruiting of Yoshino Shinji. Yamamoto personally went to Todai* and explained to the law faculty that he wanted some bright young law graduates for the Ministry of Agriculture and Commerce. As a result, the school's advisers steered Yoshino to MAC rather than to the more prestigious Home Affairs or Finance ministries, which he had expected to join. Yoshino recalled that when he entered the ministry in 1913 there were only three or four officials in commercial administration who had law degrees.
11
Yamamoto was proud of Yoshino and took good care of him. Ten months after Yoshino had joined the ministry, Yamamoto delegated him as the resident Japanese representative to the San Francisco International Exposition of 1915. It was a superb opportunity for a young
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man to study abroad and to widen his horizons. Yoshino stayed in San Francisco for a year and a half, auditing courses in labor economics at Berkeley (he specifically recalls Professor Ira Cross), traveling around the country, and receiving an overseas salary of ?245 per month compared with the ?45 he would have been paid in Tokyo.
The efforts and the politics of people like Yamamoto were not particularly appreciated among the dominant agriculturalists within the ministry. Their orientation was physiocratic (
*), and they felt a philosophical sympathy for the rural way of life, so they were not pleased by the rise of industrialism or by the growing influence of the zaibatsu. Soejima Sempachi, a commercial-track official who was nonetheless serving as chief of the Agricultural Policy Section at the time of the 1918 'rice riots,' later charged that the whole Agricultural Affairs Bureau was sympathetic to the interests of landlords.
12
This was probably true, but it must be understood that agricultural bureaucrats also represented one wing of then current liberal opinion. To them the most serious social problem of the nation was rural poverty and tenancy, a problem to which they believed the government was insufficiently attentive, particularly in comparison to the privileges it extended to the zaibatsu.
This social consciousness of the agricultural bureaucrats is sometimes called 'Ishiguroism,' after the great elder statesman of agricultural administration, Ishiguro Tadaatsu (18841960). From 1919 to 1925 Ishiguro was chief of the Agricultural Policy Section, Agricultural Affairs Bureau, in MAC. He became vice-minister of agriculture in 1934 and minister of agriculture in the second Konoe (194041) and Suzuki (1945) cabinets. He was famous for recruiting social activists to his ministry (for example, the post-World War II socialist politician Wada Hiroo), and for donating a part of his salary during the 1930's to aid tenant farmers. During the period of World War I he and his followers imbued the ministry with a sense of mission to protect the small tenant farmer, and the Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry that resulted from the break-up of MAC was regarded as the most 'progressive' in the interwar government.
13
The dominance of the agricultural career path in MAC is also revealed by its personnel deployments. The ministry grew from 2,422 total employees in 1890 to 7,918 in 1920 and 8,362 at
