The motive force for rapid growth was fixed investment in plant and equipment. Private fixed investment grew from 7.8 percent of GNP in 1 946 to 21.9 percent in 1961 .34
When imported raw materials were in short supply in the late 1940s and the 1950s the government took charge of their allocation to industries it thought would best contribute to the growth of the economy, to the building up of key industries like coal mining, iron and steel and the expansion of exports.
The Ministry of International Trade and Industry (MITI) issued "guidelines" to industry which it ignored at its peril. The giant firms that had accepted the dictates of the war economy before August 1945 as essential to military expansion now accepted the dictates of MITI as essential to peaceful economic expansion:
Japanese entrepreneurs are vigorous in investing. They will not confine their fixed investment within the limit of gross profits or internal accumulation, unlike the case of entrepreneurs in other advanced countries. Even if the fixed investment is over and above their gross profits, the enterprise will undertake investment so long as bank finance is available.35
In other words, the heads of big business and the state worked together to ensure the growth of Japanese national capitalism by mobilising the whole mass of surplus value and directing it towards "strategic" sectors, regardless of considerations of short-term profitability. What other state capitals did with military considerations uppermost, Japanese state capitalism did in the interests of overseas market competition. Exports played a very important role in driving the economy forwards. And that meant that Japanese growth was ultimately dependent on the US arms economy. As Robert Brenner shows in a highly empirical study:
German and Japanese manufacturers derived much of their dynamism by means of appropriating large segments of the fast-growing world market from the US and UK, while beginning to invade the US domestic market. This redistribution of market share-the filling of orders (demand) by German and Japanese manufacturers that had formerly been supplied by US producers-gave a powerful boost to their investment and output.36
The Long Boom
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