ORGANIZATION
MITI
Japan's Ministry of International Trade and Industry, the pilot agency that orchestrated the postwar Japanese economic miracle through coordinated industrial policy — and the institutional model that subsequently shaped Korean, Taiwanese, and Chinese developmental strategy.
The Ministry of International Trade and Industry (MITI) was the Japanese government agency that orchestrated the country's postwar transformation from a war-devastated economy into a global technological powerhouse. Operating from 1949 until its 2001 reorganization into the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry, MITI deployed the full toolkit of developmental state intervention: import quotas, directed lending through state-controlled banks, technology licensing requirements, export targets, strategic industry selection, and coordinated public-private investment planning. Chalmers Johnson's 1982 study MITI and the Japanese Miracle made the agency the canonical example of the developmental state, demonstrating that the Japanese economic transformation was not the product of free markets but of strategic state coordination on a scale that contemporary economic orthodoxy would denounce as massively distortionary. Chang treats MITI as the paradigmatic case of what successful AI industrial policy would look like — a competent state agency with the authority and capacity to coordinate the kind of strategic investment that building domestic AI capability requires.
