ministries.
Yoshino was infuriated by Ikeda's appointment. He realized why Ikeda might be politically preferable to an ex-bureaucrat, but he also believed that Ikeda would not carry out industrial policy faithfully, and that it was an insult to MCI to be put under a zaibatsu minister. Concerning his own future, Yoshino sought the advice of his sempai and long-time friend from MAC days, Ito * Bunkichi, the illegitimate son of the genro* Ito Hirobumi and the son-in-law of former Prime Minister Katsura Taro*. Ito had left MAC in the early 1920's and taken a position in Ayukawa's Nissan zaibatsu. He now urged Yoshino to join his colleague Kishi in Manchuria and invited him to become an executive of the Ayukawa group. The Konoe cabinet recommended Yoshino as president of the new North China Development Company (while still minister Yoshino had drafted the law establishing the company, although the army sponsored it in the Diet), but the army vetoed him as insufficiently nationalistic to head an organization governing territory won by army blood.
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Yoshino was probably lucky he did not get this job, as it very likely would have led to his arrest after the war as a war criminalassuming, of course, that he would have survived the war. Forced to act on his own, Yoshino visited Hsinking, where Ayukawa instead appointed him as one of two vice-presidents (the other was a Manchurian) of Mangyo*. Yoshino was frustrated in Manchuria by excessive army control and Ayukawa's lack of capital for big projects. While working there, he received an Imperial appointment to the House of Peers, and on November 10, 1940, he returned to Tokyo to take it up. He remained an adviser to Mangyo but was replaced as vice-president by Takasaki Tatsunosuke, then president of the Mangyo-affiliated Manchurian Airplane Company. Takasaki was later MITI minister in the second Kishi cabinet (195859), and he was the Japanese sponsor of the famous Liao-Takasaki agreement for unofficial Sino-Japanese trade during the 1960's.
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During the Pacific War the Home Ministry appointed Yoshino governor of Aichi prefecture, and throughout 1944 he worked hard trying to cope with the bombing of Nagoya and with the death in his city of the chief Chinese puppet, Wang Ching-wei, who had been hospitalized there after an assassination attempt in China. Yoshino was purged but not tried during the occupation.
On April 24, 1953, Yoshino was elected to the House of Councillors from his native Miyagi prefecture. He had run on a platform of 'economic independence' (from U.S. aid) and 'rebuild Japan's economy.' In the Diet he served as chairman of the upper house's Commerce and Industry Committee (where he was more of a problem for MITI than the ministry anticipated), and then as minister of transportation in the third Hatoyama cabinet (195556).
Yoshino never seemed to have any qualms about tapping the connections he had made during his bureaucratic service. Back in June 1934, while he was still vice-minister, he had helped Zen Keinosuke (18871951), Fujihara Ginjiro * (18691960), and other business leaders to establish the Japan Mutual Life Insurance Company (Nihon Dantai Seimei Hoken Kai), a company promoted by the prewar predecessor of the Japan Federation of Employers' Associations (Nikkeiren) to provide life insurance at reasonable rates for industrial workers. (Zen was a school classmate of Yoshino's and a fellow MAC official from 1914 to 1926. He resigned to become the secretary and a director of the Japan Industrial Club. After the war he became the first director-general of the Economic Stabilization Board. Fujihara was the founder of the Mitsui-connected Oji* Paper Company and became MCI minister during the first half of 1940.)
In January 1952, following the death of Zen Keinosuke the previous November, Yoshino succeeded him as chairman of the Japan Mutual Life Insurance Company, a post he retained for the next thirteen years. Yoshino retired as a member of the Diet in May 1959 and devoted himself to service as president of Musashi College, a position he held concurrently with his other commitments from 1956 to 1965. He died May 9, 1971, at the age of 84. Kishi Nobusuke delivered the eulogy at his funeral.
During 1938, in Tokyo, the new MCI minister Ikeda and vice-minister Murase got along fine. They liked each other, and both saw the world in essentially the same (commercial) terms; they shared the belief that economic control should mean self-imposed control by civilian industrial leaders themselves. Ikeda led the fight in the government to prevent the state-control view from prevailingShiroyama calls him the leader of the 'status quo faction'and he established
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the precedent of businessmen serving in the cabinet in order to restrain the military, one that his successors Fujihara Ginjiro * and Kobayashi Ichizo* continued.
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During late 1938 Ikeda clashed violently with Home Minister (Admiral) Suetsugu Nobumasa over the attempts to enforce articles 6 (labor control) and 11 (limitation on dividends and forced loans) of the mobilization law. Suetsugu took the view that if the government were going to control the people, it should also control the capitalists. Ikeda was not completely successful in preventing this, but as Tiedemann remarks, ''In the future, control over capital would become tighter, but Ikeda had set the pattern for making the controls on the business community the lightest of all in the war economy.'
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A result of his battle was that Ikeda was forced to leave the cabinet, and in January 1939 the Konoe government resigned in favor of the Hiranuma government, which was conservative but not necessarily pro-state control.
In order to eliminate the defects in the TMCB system and also to make MCI conform more closely in its overall operation to the mission it had been given by the economic general staff, Murase totally reorganized the Ministry of Commerce and Industry during early 1939. Despite his lack of sympathy with the controlled economy, Murase's reform was ironically the single most important structural change of MCI in the direction of greater control until the creation of MITI. Maeda Yasuyuki argues that Murase's vertical bureaus organized according to industry were the most valuable legacy of the war years; and former MITI Vice-Minister Kumagai Yoshifumi (196869) holds that industrial policy itself is synonymous with the industrial bureaus; without them a ministry would not be close enough to industry to exercise real guidance or control and could achieve no more than general economic policy.
49
MITI's
says that after the reform MCI had already become a ministry of munitions, although it did not receive that name officially for four more years.
50
Murase abolished the Temporary Materials Coordination Bureau, the Commercial Affairs Bureau, the Control Bureau (successor after May 1, 1937, to the Temporary Industrial Rationality Bureau), and several other units. He combined their functions into one powerful coordinating and policy-making organization, the General Affairs Bureau (Somu* Kyoku), which is the origin of the contemporary MITI Secretariat. In addition, Murase took the specialized sections of the Industrial Affairs and Mining bureaus and made each of them into
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separate bureaus (see Appendix B). The result was not yet
