Industrial Japan

Every person on the planet is entangled in a web of ecological relationships that link farms and factories with human consumers. Our lives depend on these relationships -- and are imperiled by them as well. Nowhere is this truer than on the Japanese archipelago. During the nineteenth century, Japan saw the rise of Homo sapiens industrialis, a new breed of human transformed by an engineered, industrialized, and poisonous environment. Toxins moved freely from mines, factory sites, and rice paddies into human bodies. Toxic Archipelago explores how toxic pollution works its way into porous human bodies and brings unimaginable pain to some of them. Brett Walker examines startling case studies of industrial toxins that know no boundaries: deaths from insecticide contaminations; poisonings from copper, zinc, and lead mining; congenital deformities from methylmercury factory effluents; and lung diseases from sulfur dioxide and asbestos. This powerful, probing book demonstrates how the Japanese archipelago has become industrialized over the last two hundred years -- and how people and the environment have suffered as a consequence.

First published in 2000. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

In this new book, Hara, Kambayashi and Matsushima gather together a collection of case studies of innovation in various industries in modern Japan, including automobile, electronics, semiconductor, component, chemical, pharmaceutical and service industries. Unlike other books in this area, this book focuses on a broader range of Japanese industries from the post world war era to the modern day and considers the relationships between the characteristics of innovation and the features of Japanese society. These chapters demonstrate Japan’s shift from being product-oriented and domestic to being business system-oriented and global. Meanwhile the process of innovation in Japan continues to include the tendency of eliminating uncertainty through intimate in-process interaction between different functions, rather than through preset rule or contracts. This book goes some way in challenging accepted notions of Japanese innovation, emphasising new and diverse trends and practises.

The focus of this book is on the Japanese economic bureaucracy, particularly on the famous Ministry of International Trade and Industry (MITI), as the leading state actor in the economy. Although MITI was not the only important agent affecting the economy, nor was the state as a whole always predominant, I do not want to be overly modest about the importance of this subject. The particular speed, form, and consequences of Japanese economic growth are not intelligible without reference to the contributions of MITI. Collaboration between the state and big business has long been acknowledged as the defining characteristic of the Japanese economic system, but for too long the state's role in this collaboration has been either condemned as overweening or dismissed as merely supportive, without anyone's ever analyzing the matter. The history of MITI is central to the economic and political history of modern Japan. Equally important, however, the methods and achievements of the Japanese economic bureaucracy are central to the continuing debate between advocates of the communist-type command economies and advocates of the Western-type mixed market economies. The fully bureaucratized command economies misallocate resources and stifle initiative; in order to function at all, they must lock up their populations behind iron curtains or other more or less impermeable barriers. The mixed market economies struggle to find ways to intrude politically determined priorities into their market systems without catching a bad case of the "English disease" or being frustrated by the American-type legal sprawl. The Japanese, of course, do not have all the answers. But given the fact that virtually all solutions to any of the critical problems of the late twentieth century--energy supply, environmental protection, technological innovation, and so forth--involve an expansion of official bureaucracy, the particular Japanese priorities and procedures are instructive. At the very least they should forewarn a foreign observer that the Japanese achievements were not won without a price being paid.

Intro -- Preface To The Third Edition -- I The Japanese Industrial System -- Chapter 1. Japan And The New Global Economy -- 1.1 Introduction -- 1.2 Japan As Industrial Superpower -- 1.3 Paradoxes Of Asian Growth -- 1.4 Japan As Learner And Teacher -- 1.5 From Follower To Leader -- 1.6 Strategies For The 21St Century -- 1.7 Summary And Conclusions -- Chapter 2. Samurai Management: A Framework For Analysis -- 2.1 Introduction -- 2.2 Japanese Society: Adversity Management -- 2.3 Hardware And Software As Core Concepts -- 2.4 Japanese Hardware: A Comparative Perspective -- 2.5 Organizational Software Systems -- 2.6 Summary And Conclusions -- Ii Japan'S Societal Policies -- Chapter 3. Japan Inc.: Business-Government Relations -- 3.1 Introduction -- 3.2 The Social Origins Of Business-Government -- 3.3 The Structure Of Modern Government -- 3.4 Government And Big Business -- 3.5 Summary And Conclusions -- Chapter 4. The Visible Hand: Industrial Planning -- 4.1 Introduction -- 4.2 Origins Of Industrial Planning -- 4.3 Japan'S Five Year Plan -- 4.4 Industrial Structure Goals -- 4.5 Resource Dependence Planning -- 4.6 Portfolio Approach To Sectors -- 4.7 Japan'S Export Strategy -- 4.8 Japan'S Sunset Industries -- 4.9 Summary And Conclusions -- Chapter 5. Technology And The Knowledge Economy -- 5.1 Introduction -- 5.2 Technology And The Economy -- 5.3 The Organization Of Science In Japan -- 5.4 Formulating Science Policy -- 5.5 Technological Diffusion -- 5.6 Creative Technology Policies -- 5.7 Technology Policy In Comparative Perspective -- 5.8 Summary And Conclusions -- Chapter 6. Asian Wall Street: Japanese Banking And Finance -- 6.1 Introduction -- 6.2 Financial Policy And Economic Development -- 6.3 Japan'S Banking System: An Overview -- 6.4 From Competition Within Japan -- 6.5 ... To Tomorrow, The World -- 6.6 Summary And Conclusions.

Monograph on industrial policy and the organization of business and industry in Japan - analyses the distinctive features of the Japanese industrial structure (e.g. Industrial monopolys, permanent employment, prevalence of small enterprises, market structure, etc.), and compares it with the industrial system in the USA, etc. References and statistical tables.

Over the postwar period, the scope of industrial policy has expanded markedly. Governments in virtually all advanced industrial countries have extended the visible hand of the state in assisting specific industries or individual companies. Although greater government involvement in some countries has lessened the dislocations brought about by slower growth rates, industrial policy has also caused or exacerbated a number of other problems, including distortions in the allocation of capital and labor and trade conflicts that undermine the postwar system of free trade. Only Japan is widely cited as an unambiguous success story. The effectiveness of its industrial policy is revealed in the successful emergence of one government-targeted industry after another as world-class competitors: for example, steel, automobiles, and semiconductors. Foreign countries fear that a number of still-developing industries—like biotechnology, telecommunications, and information processing—will follow the same pattern. But is industrial policy the main reason for Japan's economic achievements? The author asserts that the reasons for Japan's spectacular track record go well beyond the realm of industrial policy into broad areas of the political economy as a whole. In this book, the author attempts to identify the reasons for the comparative effectiveness of Japanese industrial policy for high technology by answering the following questions: What is the attitude of Japanese leaders toward state intervention in the marketplace? What is the Ministry of International Trade and Industry (MITI) doing to promote the development of high technology? How has the organization of the private sector contributed to MITI's capacity to intervene effectively? What elements in Japan's political system help insulate industrial policymaking from the demands of interest-group politics?

The conventional picture of industry and industrial relations in Japan is of a number of very large firms providing extremely attractive working conditions for their happy and contented workforce. Norma Chalmers shows that there is in fact another, very different side to the picture, which occurs in the the peripheral sector. Here, conditions are often poor, wages very low and continuity of employment virtually non-existent. There are many small firms where the effectiveness of worker organisation and bargaining declines as the firm's size and proximity to the industrial centre decrease. Moreover, as Chalmers shows, the peripheral sector is very large, and the conventional picture of the model workforce should probably be confined to a few flagship companies. The book argues that the model nature of the large firms may stem in part from the fact that they are able to off-load problems onto smaller firms who produce the components necessary for the large firm sector at disadvantageous subcontract terms.