The End of the Industrial Adjustment Policy

This chapter takes a retrospective review of the policies for “industrial adjustment” conducted by the Ministry of International Trade and IndustryMinistry of International Trade and Industry (MITI) (MITI) and its successor, the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry (METI), in postwar Japan, and examines the effects of their completion which occurred from the end of the 1990s to the beginning of the 2000s. The essentials of these policies are (1) adjustments of supply and demand at production or investment level in the depressed industries and (2) mitigation of unemployment problem or social conflicts. MITIMinistry of International Trade and Industry (MITI) had played the role of coordinator among various concerned interests as needed to reflect changing circumstances in successive periods. However, in the latter half of the 1990s and on, the conventional industrial adjustment policies were ended, and some parts of the policies related to the restructuring and industrial revival were inherited by the “industrial revitalization policy” which MITI (METI) established as one of the new lines of policies at that time. Although this policy was based on market mechanism in principle, the policy intervention on the industries, especially on the specific firms to protect them, persisted in different forms, whereas some aspects of the labor were excessively “marketized.”