Few publications in English are available on government–business relations in Taishô and early Shôwa Japan, one of the rarities being Miles Fletcher's fine book on private business and interwar trade policy (The Japanese Business Community and National Trade Policy, 1920–1942 [Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989]). From that standpoint, Peter von Staden's study of business influence on national policy and legislation affecting the Japanese iron and steel industry from 1916 to 1934, the year in which the state Yawata works merged with private-sector firms, is a welcome addition to the literature. The author finds evidence of substantive negotiations between businessmen and government bureaucrats in the formal meetings of advisory bodies and Diet committees, and he takes pains to defend his approach against claims that “the ‘real’ decision-making process” took place “behind closed doors” (p. x). He presents examples of disagreement and prolonged debate in such formal venues as indications that businessmen considered them forums where they could actually “shape outcomes” rather than simply rubberstamp decisions made in “backroom dealings” (p. 10). In the case of the Iron and Steel Promotion Law of 1917, for instance, Von Staden shows that, although business members of a consultative commission that the Ministry of Agriculture and Commerce formed were unable to modify the government's proposal for subsidizing only large-scale private producers, business interests ultimately won, through the Diet, a significant expansion in the number of firms eligible for support.
Von Staden states at the outset that he is going to examine, as loci of government–business interaction, consultative councils or shingikai, which comprised mostly state officials, businessmen, and scholars and provided—and, in altered form since the U.S. occupation, continue to provide—advice to Japan's ministries on public policy. He discusses two such advisory councils, investigative commissions that the government set up in 1916 and in 1919, but he lumps them together with Diet legislative committees, which he also labels shingikai consisting of “business” and “government” representatives. As he points out, Diet members typically had multiple identities not only as politicians but also as businessmen, landlords, journalists, and the like. Yet we get little sense from Von Staden's treatment of parliamentary committees that all but a fraction of lower house legislators were also members of political parties, not just spokesmen for business or other interests, or that the two major parties were alternating in power during most of the years under consideration—and hardly any mention of party platforms regarding the various issues on which the Dietmen interpellated ministerial spokesmen during committee meetings.
Von Staden emphasizes “the scarcity of documents” on business–government relations during the period in question (p. 18). For primary sources, he utilizes the records of deliberations by the Industrial Club of Japan, a big-business association formed in 1917; by a consultative council the government established in 1919 to investigate economic and fiscal matters; and by special legislative committees in seven Diet sessions between 1916 and 1933. Besides these records, the author might also have looked at other supplemental materials including the published diaries and memoirs of key actors such as Seiyûkai president and prime minister Hara Kei (Satoshi) and steel company engineer and executive Imaizumi Kaichirô (Hara Kei nikki, ed. Hara Keiichirô, 6 vols. [Tokyo : Fukumura shuppan, 1965–69]; Imaizumi Kaichirô, Nippon kôkan kabushiki kaisha sôgyô nijû nen kaikoroku [self-published, 1933]), or contemporary newspapers such as Jiji shinpô, whose editor served both on a Diet subcommittee that considered the government's proposed promotion law in 1917 and on the interwar advisory council on economic and fiscal policy (pp. 64, 84). In addition, he mentions “secret meetings” that took place before lower house deliberations on a bill to revise tariff rates in 1926 and speculates that they represented a parallel set of discussions by a “higher” decision-making body (pp. 123–27), but the secret gatherings were likely closed-door meetings of those very same legislative committees, as provided for in the Meiji constitution, and for which stenographic records appear to be available (see Teikoku Gikai shûgiin himitsukai giji sokkiroku, 2 vols. [Tokyo: Shûgiin jimukyoku, 1996]).
Von Staden does an effective job of laying out the economic context for state–business interaction in the iron and steel industry, describing, for instance, the sudden increase in demand during World War I and private-sector alarm over plans for further expansion of Yawata in the midst of the wartime “steel famine” as well as the ensuing contraction and consolidation of the industry in the postwar recession, trends that directly affected business responses to government policy. However, he could have set the political context more fully and clearly by paying greater attention to the role of political parties and differentiating between the consultative and legislative processes. Nevertheless, the general point that he makes is well founded: that after mid-Meiji, with the opening of the Diet, the establishment of consultative councils by government ministries, and the formation of increasingly powerful industry associations, business interests enjoyed a number of institutional channels through which to influence public policy and legislation and that those formal channels offer promising lines of empirical research on state–business relations in modern Japan.
