Word: miti
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...austere 17-story Ministry of International Trade and Industry in the heart of Tokyo dangled a huge white banner last week. In bold calligraphy it exhorted passersby: LET US SHAKE HANDS WITH NATIONS OF THE WORLD BY IMPORTING MORE GOODS. In his 13th-floor office, Hiroshi Sugiyama, head of MITI's Bureau of Industrial Policies, echoed the spirit of the banner. "To Japan," he said, "the economic priority is not kyoso ((competition)) but kyocho ((conciliation)) with the rest of the world...
...under pressure, the Japanese are busily trying to develop entirely new markets. The government of Prime Minister Yasuhiro Nakasone has offered its blessing -- and a sizable chunk of its budget -- to firms that are moving into such high-tech fields as supercomputers, biotechnology, lasers, aerospace and artificial intelligence. At MITI's Electrotechnical Laboratory in Tsukuba Science City, 37 miles northeast of | Tokyo, scientists are building exotic robots that, among other uses, have proved handy for entertaining foreign guests. British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, for one, enjoyed a game of catch with the lab's artificial hand...
...secret shipments, Toshiba Machine disguised eight sophisticated milling machines as simple hole-boring devices and rechristened them with misleading jargon (in one case, from a model MBP 110 to a TDP 70/110) to fool MITI inspectors. When Toshiba had brought Soviet officials to its plant to see the machines work, engineers demonstrated only the simple functions during normal working hours, then later showed off the equipment's true capacity when the plant was deserted, the report claims. The secrecy extended even to accounting: Toshiba Machine allegedly split the proceeds from one shipment into two semiannual periods to avoid drawing attention...
...when a disgruntled Japanese trading-company employee who helped with the sale wrote a whistle-blowing statement that found its way to MITI. The agency's initial probe made no headway, since Toshiba Machine's executives stuck so uniformly to their phony story. Inside the company, a full-scale cover-up was under way, in which employees incinerated documents by tossing them into factory furnaces. When the allegations were finally leaked to the press last March, MITI was compelled to send the police, who grilled employees until the truth emerged...
Japanese officials rushed to keep the trade conflict from spinning out of control. Foreign Minister Tadashi Kuranari urged that "overall U.S.-Japanese relations should not be undermined by this issue." Makoto Kuroda, a senior member of the country's powerful Ministry of International Trade and Industry (MITI), prepared to hie to Washington. His job: to convey dismay at the bombshell U.S. decision to retaliate with some $300 million worth of tariffs on a wide range of Japanese electronic goods. In addition, former Japanese Foreign Minister Shintaro Abe has been named as a special envoy by Tokyo to help deflect...