Politics for protection: Japanese interwar economic policy towards the petroleum and automobile industries

In portraying Japanese political economy, existing accounts (i.e., Japan, Inc., Statism, pluralism) assume the state-firm relationship as a fixed set of relations and structures and thus ignore or fail to specify the contingent aspect of the state-firm relationship which is characterized by power sharing among intrastate agencies (ministries) and private firms. By focusing on the interaction of economic ideas and organizational interests in cases of petroleum and automobile industries in interwar Japan, this dissertation sorts out two rival ideas of politico-economic discourse on the nature of industry and trade and their developmental strategy, "trade-oriented mercantilism" and "autarky-oriented mercantilism," and then explores (1) how these ideas were linked with organizational interests of intrastate agencies, (2) how they were interwoven in different temporal and spatial settings, and (3) what were the mechanisms by which resulted intrastate coalitions interacted with economic interests of firms.;This analysis shows that the state and firms shared power in the way in which the state defined the agenda while allowing firms to decide and implement certain issues shaped by the agenda. The Japanese state had the "confining power" (the ability to confine the scope of decision making to certain issues) which resulted from its consistent attempts to remove politically sensitive issues out of the political arena and into the administrative arena. The state successfully prevented open political contestation or public airing of political conflict over these issues by eliminating from agenda setting the intervention of political parties, the Diet, and the Cabinet, and forcing private firms to deal directly with the state over processual and administrative issues. As a result, firms competed for a "share of power," and not for "control of power.".