*)or, in Nakamura Takafusa's description, civilian bureaucrats who were attracted by Nazi ideology.
12
Ide and Ishida bluntly define the reform bureaucrats as 'anti-liberal, anti-parties, nationalistic, pro-military, pro-fascist, and above all in favor of strengthening governmental control.'
13
They were found in all ministries and rose to influence after the assassination of Inukai as part of the vigorous intrabureaucratic competition to fill the vacuum left by the political parties. By cooperating with the military, whether for ideological reasons or just because that was the way the wind was blowing, some bureaucrats rapidly advanced their own careers.
In old-line ministries such as Finance and Foreign Affairs, the mainstream of bureaucratic leadership tried to resist the growing influence of the military, but these ministries tended to lose power over the decade to the ministries that cooperated, such as MCI. Within MCI Yoshino was critical of the reform bureaucrats as 'flatterers of the military,' even though his protege Kishi was a model reform bureaucrat and Yoshino himself was in good favor with the military because of his essentially technocratic political stance.
14
Yoshino also recognized that the admission of military officers on detached service into MCI, a practice he had authorized for the Fuel Bureau and several other new units, affected the ministry's personnel affairs. The militarists regularly used their political power to block promotions of young officials whom they considered insufficiently 'reformist.' Most of the officials working in industrial administration, as distinct from commercial administration, became reform bureaucrats to some extent, and this led to a factional alignment under Yoshino's successors and under Kishi that would affect the ministry for decades to come.
The military equivalent of the reform bureaucratsthe
*, or 'reform staff officers'looked on the reform bureaucrats as possible civilian replacements for the old political party leaders, whom they held to be corrupt and to constitute prime obstacles to the building of a 'national defense state' in Japan. In October 1934 the Army Ministry published an inflammatory pamphlet calling for national mobilization, opposition to 'classes that live by unearned profit,' and the expansion of production and trade under state control. To implement this program the army advocated that its cadres make alliances with ''new bureaucrats,' and the term thereby entered popular parlance.
15
One important source of reform bureaucrats was officials who had served in Manchuria as transferees after the proclamation in March
Page 125
1932 of the new state of Manchukuo. Since the army actually ran Manchukuo, those who were invited to work there had to be in sympathy with the military's ideas for the renovation of Japan itself. The MCI contingent that served in Manchuria is particularly important for postwar industrial policy because, as Shiina Etsusaburo * wrote in 1976, Manchuria was 'the great proving ground' for Japanese industry.
16
We shall identify them and describe their activities below.
Some important reform bureaucrats in MCI and in closely related economic bureaucracies were Kishi Nobusuke, Shiina Etsusaburo, Uemura Kogoro*, Kogane Yoshiteru (director of the Fuel Bureau in 1941 and a postwar Diet member), Hashii Makoto (who served in the postwar Economic Stabilization Board and then became president of Tokyo Gauge Company), Minobe Yoji* (Minobe Tatsukichi's nephew, chief of the Munitions Ministry's Machinery Bureau and postwar vice-president of Japan Hydrogen Industries), Wada Hiroo (from the Agriculture Ministry and postwar minister of agriculture in the first Yoshida cabinet), Sakomizu Hisatsune (from the Finance Ministry and postwar director-general of the Economic Planning Agency and postal minister in the Ikeda cabinets), Aoki Kazuo (from the Finance Ministry, president of the Cabinet Planning Board, and postwar member of the House of Councillors of the Diet), and Hoshino Naoki (from the Finance Ministry, president of the Cabinet Planning Board, and postwar chairman of the Tokyu* hotel chain and the Diamond Publishing Company). Not surprisingly, a few of the reform bureaucrats turned out to be not rightists but left socialists and cryptocommunists; their presence on the 'economic general staff' produced a major scandal in 1941, as we shall see later in this chapter.
Before the second Konoe cabinet was established in 1940, the mainstream factions in most ministries tried quietly to check the influence of the reform bureaucrats, whom they regarded as excessively ambitious. The promilitary bureaucrats therefore often sought transfers to Manchuria or to the cabinet-level bureaus of the economic general staff, where military influence was strong. In May 1935, when the Cabinet Research Bureau was set up, Minister Machida of MCI suggested that Yoshino take the post as first director of the bureau, but he did not insist when Yoshino refused.
17
Instead, the prime minister chose Yoshida Shigeru (18851954), who must be carefully distinguished from the Foreign Ministry bureaucrat of exactly the same name who became prime minister after the war. This Yoshida was a Home Ministry bureaucrat, a member of the ultranationalist Society for the Maintenance of the National Prestige (Kokuikai), and minister of munitions in the Koiso cabinet of 1944.
Page 126
At the time of its establishment, Yoshida's Research Bureau brought together officials from the Army, Navy, Home, Finance, Commerce, Agriculture, and Communications ministries, plus two cabinet officials serving concurrently in the Resources Bureau.
18
MCI sent two officials, Hashii Makoto and Fujita Kuninosuke (from January 1934 to May 1935 chief of Department One of the TIRB and after the war first a member of the American-sponsored Securities and Exchange Commission and then a professor at Chuo* University). Yoshida asked Kishi to join, but he had bigger fish to fry in MCI and in Manchuria and therefore declined. One of the two Agriculture Ministry officials at the Research Bureau was Wada Hiroo, a prominent leader of the left socialists in postwar politics.
The pronounced 'new bureaucrat' coloration of both the deliberation council and the Research Bureau in the Okada cabinet produced strong denunciations by some political party and business leaders. The deliberation council soon became a dead letter and was quietly abolished when the government changed. The Research Bureau, however, persisted and became embroiled in one of the historic controversies of the early controlled-economy era. A plan like the Petroleum Industry Law of 1934 was sponsored by the Cabinet Research Bureau for the reorganization and
