Planning for Empire: Reform Bureaucrats and the Japanese Wartime State by Janis Mimura (review)

Janis Mimura's Planning for Empire examines the ideas and activities of civilian and mili­tary bureaucrats who prepared Japan for total war in the period 1930-1945. Drawing on a wealth of largely untapped primary materials and journals, ¹ the work focuses specifically on a group of elite bureaucrats, predominantly graduates of Tokyo Imperial University, and army staff officers who were the driving force behind the reorganization of the Japanese economy in the 1930s and 1940s. After Japan's defeat, the reforms paved the way for the so-called Japanese economic "miracle" of the postwar years. As Mimura shows, inspiration for these reforms came from Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union.

In the 1930s, world capitalism was in crisis. Though there were many differences between fascists and communists, both agreed on one thing: given the failure of laissez-faire capital­ism, central planning offered the only way out. Japanese bureaucrats were watching the to­talitarian experiments in Germany and the Soviet Union with great interest, and a number of them became convinced that it was vital to introduce central planning and a command economy in Japan to allow the country to weather the world depression and to achieve its destined greatness by territorial expansion. These bureaucrats are the subject of Mimura's pioneering study. Compared to their Nazi and Bolshevik counterparts, Japan's reform-minded bureaucrats and army officers labored under a major disadvantage-they had to contend with powerful opposition from conservatives and others who felt their interests threatened by radical change of any kind. But unlike in Germany and Soviet Russia, they had a unique opportunity to give a command economy a trial run before unleashing it at home. In 1931 the Japanese army had annexed the northern territories of China known as Manchuria, turning it into a puppet state.

A number of works have been published on Manchuria and on the introduction of a com­mand economy in Japan, ² but Mimura's is the first English-language synthesis that traces the history of central planning in Japan from its inception in the corridors of power in Tokyo, through the experimentation period in Manchuria, to its final implementation in Japan.

Mimura's contribution is particularly valuable precisely because it deals with men who were in a position to put their ideas into practice. The fact that most of these men have been consigned to historical oblivion does not diminish their importance. The civilian bu­reaucrats included Kishi Nobusuke, Hoshino Naoki, Minobe Yōji, Mōri Hideoto, Miyazaki Masayoshi, Sakomizu Hisatsune, and Okumura Kiwao.

Army men are generally not considered bureaucrats, but Japan's elite staff officers' outlook was perhaps more bureaucratic than warrior-like. Endless factional infighting that divided and weakened the Japanese army bears witness to their bureaucratic spirit. In the 1930s several relatively low-ranking, reform-minded bureaucratic staff officers with radical views, including Ishiwara Kanji, Tōjō Hideki, Suzuki Teiichi, Akinaga Tsukizō, and Ikeda Sumi­hisa, found themselves in positions where they could influence the course of history by for­mulating and executing important policies. That they were able to do so was initially due to a strange abdication of duty by their superior officers, and later to their close collaboration with civilian reformist bureaucrats.

Japanese bureaucrats have always claimed to stand above party politics and shun ideol­ogy. Yet, as Mimura's book shows, many civilian and military bureaucrats were involved in politics and were certainly not above assuming strong ideological positions. Perhaps the best known of all civilian bureaucrats, Kishi benefited throughout his long bureaucratic and political career from friendships he had formed with various right-wing activists as a stu­dent at Tokyo Imperial University. On the military side, Tōjō, Suzuki, and Katakura Tadashi, for example, were active in organizations of a political nature as early as the 1920s. Mōri and Okumura were the most ideological of the bunch and had no inhibitions about...