The Enigma of Japanese Power (19 page)

The relationship between MITI and the large corporations, like that between the MOF and the banks, tends to be highly informal and personal. The effectiveness of the Japanese bureaucracy is not judged by impersonal standards. What counts is how much a ministry has ‘protected well-performing firms’ or ‘adjusted the benefits among various members of the business world’, rather than what the overall effect has been on the economy or society.
⁵²
Also, when giving instructions to business, officials at the director-general level can officially use their
hanko
(seals), but verbal or informal written communication from directors is equally effective. Business connects with the ministry mainly through the bureau directors. The latter can call the chairmen of business associations to give them orders. Consultation preceding the guidelines also takes place at the director level. If MITI guidelines are not followed, business leaders must expect retribution. The basis of MITI’s power over industry lies in its ability to withhold licences and legal permissions whenever companies balk at its wishes. Informal guidelines concerning one area of business are often heeded because of an implied threat to withhold co-operation in another area that the firm may want to venture into. Corporations also toe the line because they know that MITI, which commands a vast information-gathering network, may publicise some piece of wrongdoing from their past, undermining their prestige.

The leverage that businessmen in their turn can apply, in relation to MITI bureaucrats, is effected through the politicians. Many of the more than two hundred Diet members’ associations have relationships of mutual support with corporations. Consequently, the LDP is fairly vulnerable to business pressure, and it is customary for directors-general at MITI to respond to pressure from the LDP.

Although the more hidebound directors regard precedent as very important in the ministry’s affairs, MITI offers relatively wide scope for originality and for taking risks. Considerations of the ultimate purpose of a policy have been known to overrule custom and precedent. The entire organisation must sometimes be ‘defended’ by recourse to daring measures. And if a risky course of action is successful, the director responsible basks in glory and will be promoted. ‘Mental flexibility’ – or rather the potential to adjust, chameleon-like, to changing conditions – is highly appreciated among MITI officials, which is one reason why those with a reputation as ‘economists’, meaning that they stick to positions based exclusively on economic theory, tend to rise no higher than bureau director.
⁵³

Fairly early in their careers, Japanese bureaucrats are rewarded with a sense of truly exercising power, and with the respect of others. Informants among MITI officials confirm, even so, that in the long run their main aim, as with all bureaucrats, is to cultivate job opportunities for themselves in the world of private business.

Most cabinet ministers leave no legacy of initiatives in the ministry or government agency they have officially headed. Their major task is to defend their ministry against potentially antagonistic interest groups in the System. Some activist ministers, though, especially those who aspire to the prime ministership, are much more than figureheads. MITI and the MOF are less easily controlled by such ministers than, say, the ministries of Construction, Transport, Health and Welfare or Education. But a strong and politically astute minister holding the economically vital MITI or finance portfolios will take care to cultivate close relations with high officials and promising younger ones, and create loyalty debts by speeding up their careers through indirect manipulation.

This art of high-stakes
jinmyaku
-building was practised to great effect by such prime ministers as Ikeda Hayato, Sato Eisaku, Fukuda Takeo and, above all, Tanaka Kakuei. Takeshita Noboru has been doing it, and future candidates for the prime ministership such as Miyazawa Kiichi and Watanabe Michio have also excelled at it.

That this can have a major effect on MITI was demonstrated in June 1984 with the appointment of Konaga Keiichi as administrative vice-minister –
de facto
head of the ministry. The entire Japanese bureaucracy held its breath and marvelled at this development; for the 53-year-old Konaga was the first person to reach this top position who had not graduated from Todai. When, thirty-one years previously, he had joined MITI in a ‘class’ of thirty-eight entrants, there were only four others who had not been to Todai; still more extraordinary was that he came from Okayama University, which hardly anyone had heard of.

How could an official with such credentials ever have climbed to a top administrator position? The answer is not hard to find. When Tanaka Kakuei became MITI minister, he was given Konaga as a secretary, and Konaga remained in the post when Tanaka became prime minister. Thanks to this connection, and to his own undoubtedly superior skills, Konaga gained the reputation of having a unique system of channels to powerful politicians. It was these connections that enabled him to help bring about the armistice with the Ministry of Post and Telecommunications, and his colleagues hoped that he could use them to help revive the once proverbial dynamism of the ministry. At the vice-ministerial meetings held every Monday and Thursday to confirm the policy decisions to be automatically adopted by the cabinet the following day, the diplomacy of an official such as Konaga can be of crucial importance to a Japanese ministry.

Few episodes tell more about Tanaka’s power than the way the prime minister and nearly all the other important LDP figures rushed to his bedside when, one day in 1983, he was reported to be having breathing difficulties. When in 1985 he suffered the stroke that marked the beginning of his political decline, even Miyazawa Kiichi, long identified with the anti-Tanaka forces, hurried to the hospital; he knew that, at that time, Tanaka’s endorsement was still a prerequisite for becoming prime minister.

Tanaka began his career as a worker on road-building sites. After elementary school, he enrolled in a night-school course in civil engineering for which he could pay only after finding a job with a contractor in Tokyo. His father, a petty horse-dealer, was addicted to gambling, and his mother had to labour to prevent the family from going bankrupt. Such a childhood fits the popular Japanese stereotype of the son whose mother, through her suffering, urges him on to ever more formidable accomplishments.

At the age of nineteen Tanaka opened his own small office for building designs. His great chance came when he married a divorcee whose family owned a construction company, which he was allowed to reorganise in 1943. He accepted a risky war contract for relocating a piston-ring factory to Korea, and managed to preserve a small fortune in hard currency about which no one asked any questions after the defeat. With that financial springboard, he obtained a seat in the Lower House in 1947. In the record time of ten years he was made postal minister, and five years later became the youngest minister of finance Japan has ever had. Then, in 1972, this self-made man without formal schooling made history by becoming prime minister.

At this point Tanaka was venerated as a national hero, a living symbol of Japan’s vigorous post-war economy, social mobility and democracy. When, two months after taking over as prime minister, he returned from Peking with diplomatic accords to his credit, press and public spoke of a ‘Tanaka boom’, confident that Japan would show the world what it could do, under the leadership of this ‘computerised bulldozer’.

Some eleven years later Tanaka was to be the focus of an almost hysterical revulsion of feeling following his refusal to show remorse after the first verdict in the famous Lockheed bribery case had found him guilty as charged. The press portrayed him as a villain whose conduct was unbecoming in a Japanese and who therefore deserved to be ejected from society. His bad luck had, actually, begun in 1973. Around the time when he and bureaucrats loyal to him launched a grandiose plan for ‘remodelling the archipelago’ (basically a scheme for preparing the countryside for a vast expansion of industrial capacity), the first significant doubts began to surface about the effects of the overheated, run-wild economy on Japan’s quality of life. The Hosannas that had grown to a massive chorus when he followed Nixon to Peking became increasingly muted as inflation and economic uncertainty mounted. These were largely a result of miscalculations by the bureaucrats dating from before Tanaka’s days, but by 1974 many Japanese found the cause of what was wrong in Japan in Tanaka’s ‘money polities’, a concept that had just been invented by the newspapers. Cartoons showed Tanaka with a safe on his back, or with banknotes coming out of his ears, nose and mouth – a walking symbol of an economic miracle that had gone slightly sour.

Tanaka was forced to resign as prime minister towards the end of 1974, because a couple of muck-raking articles in a respectable magazine had exposed some of his shady financial dealings. But open season was declared on him only after the Lockheed scandal broke in the spring of 1976. In the summer of that year he was indicted on charges of bribery and of having violated the foreign exchange and foreign trade control laws. He was jailed for a few days, during which time – most damaging of all – the newspapers dropped the honorific
san
(Mr) when referring to him by name.

It was from that period, after quitting the LDP (but not his Diet seat) in symbolic atonement, that Tanaka began seeking in deadly earnest to expand his powers. He expanded his clique, which fluctuated between 80 and 90 members when he was prime minister, to reach a peak of 122 members. In addition to building a
habatsu
larger than the major opposition party, he strengthened it with an interlocking network of
jinmyaku
covering the bureaucracy and the business world, and created many ‘hidden Tanaka followers’ in the rest of the LDP.
⁵⁴
The entire apparatus became known as the Tanaka
gundan
, or ‘army corps’. It enabled Tanaka to keep his old ally Ohira Masayoshi in power as prime minister, to select the next prime minister, Suzuki Zenko, and also Suzuki’s successor, Nakasone Yasuhiro. All this he did while not even a member of the ‘ruling party’ – the ultimate instance of the type of power that is unacknowledged yet all-pervasive.

On 27 February 1985 Tanaka was struck down by a brain infarction, the probable result of an exhausting daily schedule and a history of breathing difficulties. Also responsible, in the view of his political intimates, was Tanaka’s barely contained fury with Takeshita Noboru, then a third- or fourth-ranking subcommander of the ‘corps’, for setting up a ‘study group’ of forty Tanaka
habatsu
members in an obvious bid for the prime ministership, which he attained in October 1987.

For a while political attention in Japan had narrowed to a degree beyond belief. Ever since the 1960s the LDP, thanks to its monopoly of power, had been the exclusive subject of sustained media interest, while in the late 1970s and early 1980s the focus had been further restricted to the machinations within the Tanaka
gundan
. Finally, in the spring of 1985 curiosity was concentrated on Tanaka’s sick-bed, which could not be approached by anyone except his immediate family and his faithful secretary, Hayasaka Shigeo. Two armies of photographers, one on the roof of a building opposite Tanaka’s hospital, the other balancing on top of step-ladders outside the wall of Tanaka’s palatial residence, were not even sure in which of the two places his bed was located.

In the meantime, top administrators found themselves suddenly uncertain about whom to turn to for orders. Tanaka’s incapacity created difficulties concerning appointments to top positions in the national railways and NTT, the telephone and telegraph corporation that through privatisation had just become Japan’s largest private enterprise. Negotiations relating to public works in many prefectures were stalled. Prime Minister Nakasone and his cabinet were suddenly very unsure about their chances of survival.

Many years earlier, Tanaka had discovered what is one of the central themes of this book: the emptiness at the heart of the System. Like the middle-echelon officers of the pre-war Kwantung Army, he found that this void made it relatively easy, once he had developed the right technique, to force rival power-holders into line behind him. He proceeded to set up an informal shogunate within the shell of a parliamentary democracy that was not working the way it was supposed to. Perhaps he would never have been allowed to take over the System completely, but he came as close to it as any other Japanese individual in modern times.

Tanaka’s power derived from many factors that reinforced each other, but his two major strengths were that he could spur the bureaucracy into action, and that he could virtually guarantee re-election for the members of his
habatsu
.

To the extent that Japanese voters judge their Diet representatives by their ability to extract commitments from the central bureaucrats for roads, bridges, hospitals, railways and schools, Tanaka was undoubtedly the best representative they could have wished for. Niigata, Tanaka’s prefecture, was once one of the poorest and most neglected areas along the relatively isolated Japan Sea coast. Today it is covered with paved roads, abounds in bridges and has tunnels that lead to hamlets of only a few dozen inhabitants. Two super expressways run through it, and a ‘bullet train’ stops at gigantic concrete stations serving what are little more than villages in the rice fields. There is probably no other place on earth where the pork-barrel has been so openly put on display as in Niigata. The inhabitants of the rest of Japan have reason to be jealous, for in the mid-1980s per capita funding, paid by national taxes, was 60 per cent more than the national average, and even in the late 1980s it received more public works money than any of the other forty-six prefectures.

Tanaka conquered the bastion of the Todai-ordained bureaucrats through a display of personal charm, a great interest in bureaucratic preoccupation and, most important, a phenomenal memory for legal stipulations and loopholes and for information culled from countless conversations with the best experts in officialdom. He knew where the bureaucratic skeletons were buried. He knew, as no other politician before or since, which section of which ministry was formally responsible for what kind of decisions. I have interviewed high-ranking officials who, long after his reputation had been tarnished, would fondly recall how Tanaka remembered small details of advice they had given him
en passant
eight or more years previously. His energy and knowledge earned him lasting admiration and respect from practically all bureaucrats with whom he came in contact.
⁵⁵

His talents were recognised by the former bureaucrats who ran the LDP. After Kishi and Ikeda had rewarded him with, respectively, a lucrative ministerial position (Posts) and the most important cabinet portfolio (Finance), Prime Minister Sato put him in charge of the finances of his own clique and made him secretary-general of the LDP and MITI minister.

Early in his political career Tanaka had organised the farmers and seasonal workers of Niigata. Exploited for generations, they had emerged after the war as leftist activists, but now they clung eagerly to this reliable politician who was achieving such miraculous and immediately noticeable results in the conservative stronghold of Tokyo.

Among the
koenkai
, the associations of vote-gatherers, Tanaka’s Etsuzankai was to earn a unique fame, and has provided a model for many others. With 92,000 members in Niigata alone, it maintained a grand network of branches that, among many other activities, kept careful track of when funerals and weddings took place. Until 1975 newly wed couples and people over eighty celebrating their birthday received felicitations personally signed by Tanaka. After this method was banned, they received telegrams. At every funeral ceremony burned a thick candle adorned with Tanaka’s name in brush-style calligraphy. The Etsuzankai arranged many marriages and has helped at least ten thousand people find jobs. Family relations of those benefited feel lifelong obligations towards Tanaka. In Tokyo, Tanaka held court, receiving from dozens to hundreds of petitioners every morning. All these functions – arranging marriages, finding jobs, organising weekend trips for senior citizens, helping visitors, settling local disputes – are part of the daily routine of most LDP politicians today. But it was Tanaka who perfected the method of performing them on a massive scale.

Tanaka’s most original contribution to the political history of Japan was his discovery that the techniques of effective local vote-gathering were applicable at the national level. He showed interest in the problems of village heads, municipal officials, school directors, local politicians and anyone with prestige, anywhere in the country. His formidable memory enabled him, at the very least, to speak reassuringly to people over the phone, even if he could not come up immediately with the necessary funds or bureaucratic intervention. By so doing he made admirers of large numbers of local bosses throughout Japan, who saw him as their representative in Tokyo. They did not even have to support him 100 per cent; Tanaka would genially negotiate over the phone for ‘half support’ from those with conflicting loyalties or others who, for the sake of their reputation, hesitated to identify themselves with him too closely.

The Tanaka machine offered the best hope of election to new LDP candidates in the multiple-member constituencies, thus enabling Tanaka to recruit the most talented former bureaucrats. This was the ‘carrot’; there was also a ‘stick’. When Tanaka wanted to bring a hostile LDP member into line, he could generally do so by threatening to support a rival candidate – who would thus have the better chance of winning – in the constituency of the obstructionist. Thanks to his highly placed police contacts Tanaka also had access to much information useful in keeping his opponents under control, by subtle blackmail if need be.

The gigantic group of politicians that Tanaka gathered around him by means of favouritism on a national scale had, and still has, the reputation of containing the best administrative talent to be found in Japan. Tanaka himself likened it to a large general hospital where every politician who saw his position threatened could find help. In the rank and file of his
gundan
there were specialists in every conceivable political problem; his ‘infirmary’ was even hospitable to politicians who did not belong to his group or even to the LDP.