A detailed examination of the industrial development of Japan since the Meiji Restoration.

This book reveals that the manipulation of culture was of more importance than the character of the original cultural stock in explaining Japan's modern industrialization. Thus the features of private enterprise culture that are so often isolated as keys to the nation's historical competitiveness may have been only temporary reflections of this wider process of cultural engineering: a necessary input into the program of technology transfer and late development. This book provides a highly reliable guide to the industrial economy and history and covers a wide ground; it will be of great interest to those involved in Asian studies, Japanese studies, plus economists and professionals in business and enterprise culture.

The recognised success of the post-war Japanese economy has rested on the qualities of its manufacturing industries. This book explores the origins, rationale, and consequences of this transformation. Using theoretical insights and detailed evidence, it reviews the rise of the Japanese economy and the nature, causes, and changing objectives of vertical and horizontal integration; ownership, control, financing and bank-industry relations; and the major operational functions of production, human resources, distribution and marketing.

By focusing on the educational and skill training institutions Japan has developed to generate human resources for modern industry, this book represents a new contribution to the historical analysis of Japan's modern economic growth. The authors concentrate on those large-scale industries that seem to pose the greatest challenges for an agrarian society, such as Japan was in the 1870's, in order to show how an economically less developed country becomes an advanced industrialized nation. Originally published in 1980. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

"Japanese Industrial Governance uses a wide range of original Japanese sources to explore the evolution of Japanese developmental debates, arguing that the core of the industrial governance system was in fact the result of infant industry protection and high barriers to foreign entry. In response to international pressures, in particular penetration by Anglo-American multinational corporations, the "licensing system," as Sohn refers to it, was not purely an internal, domestic decision, as it is commonly regarded. Using primarily the cases of prewar petroleum and automobiles industries, the focus of this book lies mainly in the late nineteenth century when the Meiji leaders (1868-1912) established non-tariff protective mechanisms, which were strengthened by the massive entry of foreign multinationals during the 1920s. Combined with other industrial policy tools such as subsidies and other financial incentives, the licensing system helped to establish regulated markets."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

A major addition to the literature on modern Japanese development, emphasizing the role of ideas and ideology.

In this analysis of Japan's policy-making, David Williams places his argument within the debates about Japanese political economy in the United States and Britain, debates previously polarised between `market' and `ministry' views. He presents Japanese-style nationalist development as a serious challenge to Western values and theory.

The two-volume book studies the economic and industrial development of Japan and China in modern times and draws distinctions between the different paths of industrialization and economic modernization taken in the two countries, based on statistical materials, quantitative analysis and multivariate statistical analysis. The first volume analyses the relationship between technological innovation and economic development in Japan before World War II and sheds light on technological innovation in the Japanese context with particular emphasis on the importance of the patent system. The second volume studies the basic conditions and overall economic development of industrial development, chiefly during the period of the Republic of China (1912-1949), taking a comparative perspective and bringing the case of modern Japan into the discussion. The book will appeal to academics and general readers interested in economic development and the modern economic history of East Asia, development economics, as well as industrial and technological history.

From the outset, society in Japan has been shaped by its environmental context. The lush green mountainous archipelago of today, with its highly productive lowlands, supports a population of more than 127 million people and one of the most advanced economies in the world. How has this come about and at what environmental cost? Conrad Totman, one of the world's foremost scholars on Japanese, here provides a comprehensive and detailed account of the country's environmental history, from its beginnings to the present day. Professor Totman traces the country's development through successive historical phases, as early agricultural society based on non-intensive forms of cultivation gave way to more intensified forms. With each stage came greater utilisation of natural resources but a steady reduction in the richness of the indigenous biosystem. By the late seventeenth century the country was well on the way to ecological disaster. Yet Japan's isolation in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries led to an unusually enlightened set of environmental policies, and the system of regenerative forestry brought in during the Tokugawa period prevented certain devastation of the country's forests. At the end of the nineteenth century, however, the country began to go to the opposite extreme, as industrialisation brought with it a period of unprecedented change. Growth and diversification led to a surge in environmental pollution as it became necessary to look beyond the country's domestic natural resources to meet the demand for foodstuffs, fossil fuels and the raw materials necessary to an advanced industrial economy. The population was particularly badly affected, and some of the problems that emerged, especially from the 1960s onwards, provided important test cases not just for Japan but worldwide. What makes the Japanese story particularly instructive is that the country's boundaries are uncommonly clear and the nature, timing, and extent of external influences on its history are unusually identifiable. The Japanese experience, therefore, not only yields important insights into the processes of environmental history, it offers important lessons for the wider environmental history of the planet and for our understanding of current global ecological problems. A work of immense erudition and reflecting a lifetime of scholarship, Japan: an Environmental History will be welcomed by all with an interest in environmental history and the historical development of Japan.