Ramseyer's review Railroads and the State in Meiji Japan

To the Editor | The American Historical Review | Oxford Academic

In his review of my book The Sound of the Whistle: Railroads and the State in Meiji Japan (AHR 103 (April 1998): 569-70), J. Mark Ramseyer claims that I argue: "A strong bureaucracy dominated the Japanese gov­ernment,. . - and it had designed for the country an 'industrial policy'" (p. 569). 

On the contrary, one of my central themes is that, after the opening of Japan's parliament in 1890, state bureaucrats were increasingly constrained by party politicians and the private busi­ness and beat political interests they represented. 

Moreover, the bureaucrats themselves, I maintain, were divided over railroad policy, which, because of such disagreement as well as political-party interven­tion, remained fluid and ambivalent until late in the period I cover. 

I do not say that a full-blown "industrial policy" had emerged by the end of that era; rather, I suggest that the process of decision making on rail­roads within the Meiji government prefigured the way in which the Japanese state, in later years, formed what has come to be known as "industrial policy," specifi­cally through interministerial and party-bureaucratic jockeying and negotiation, and that Meiji railroad policy set precedents for the kind of industrial targeting and restructuring that scholars have tended to view as originating no earlier than in the interwar period. 

I do assert that, judging from the hitherto-neglected railroad case, the government played a larger role in the Meiji economy than recent studies would indicate; my conception of "government," however, is not that of an autonomous, "powerful bureaucracy" but very much includes the political parties and the national parliament as key participants. 

In the end, my argu­ment falls in between the "subservient bureaucracy" thesis that the reviewer advanced in the stimulating book he co-authored with Frances Rosenbtuth, The Politics of Oligarchy (1995), and the "strong, smart bureaucracy" thesis that Chalmers Johnson presented in his now-classic MIT! and the Japanese Miracle (1982).

I appreciate Ramseyer's favorable comments on my writing and 'story-telling," but there is a set of argu­ments, albeit not as bold or provocative as the ones he himself has published, that I introduce and develop as well.

STEVEN J. ERiCSON Dartmouth College

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J. Mark Ramseyer does not with to reply.

THE EDITORS