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The production of habutae, a simple silk fabric, expanded rapidly between 1890 and 1918 in Japan's Fukui Prefecture, with large exports to Europe and the United States. The production of habutae, initially woven by hand, was labour intensive, but it gradually became capital‐intensive after the introduction of power looms. Production and export of this fabric declined precipitously from 1918. In this paper, we attribute the rise and then fall of Japan's production and export of habutae to its changing comparative advantage, which is associated with shifts from labour‐using to capital‐using production technology initiated in the United States. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

ABSTRACT An empirical regularity designated as the Number-Average Size (NAS) Rule was first identified for the case of Japan by , and subsequently extended to the United States by . This rule asserts a negative log-linear relation between the number and average population size of cities where a given industry is present. In this paper, we utilize the cluster-identification methodology developed by to sharpen this notion of 'industrial presence' by focusing only on cities that constitute at least part of a significant spatial agglomeration for the given industry. Our key result is to show that the NAS rule continues to hold (even more strongly) under this sharper definition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper aims to present and discuss social change and social policy in Japan after the mid-20th century from a sociological viewpoint. Japanese social change and social policy from the mid-20th century onward can be categorized into three models in chronological order: escape from mass poverty by means of industrialization, improvement of the social security system to establish a welfare state, and parallel progress of aspiration for a welfare society and workfare. Defined concretely, these are (1) the period that established and improved social security, which started immediately after the end of World War II and ended in 1973, when Japan began to suffer from low growth after enjoying high growth; (2) the period in which finance for social security was adjusted, halfway through which the country experienced a bubble economy; and (3) the period after the 1990s, in which the structural reform of social security went hand-in-hand with labor policy and the advent of globalization. In each of the three periods, the direction of social policy was affected by factors that caused changes in such areas as industrial structure (the decline of agriculture), demographic structure (an aging society), and family structure and work pattern (the growing trend of nuclear families, single-person households, and irregular employment). In Japan, life security now attracts increasing attention, and employment security rather than social security has been the central issue. As it is greatly affected by globalization, employment security grows less conspicuous and makes the vulnerability of social security grow more conspicuous. Social policy has the potential to become an area with which to struggle for national integration and fissures between social groups. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Much of the historical literature on the forms of industrialization has assumed that agriculture and industry must develop along separate and specialized lines, linked only at the macro level through inter-sectoral resource transfers. This paper uses the Japanese historical case, combined with the recognition, in much work on contemporary developing and developed countries, of the significance of diversification as a rural household strategy, to argue that a pattern of industrialization based on micro-level complementarity between agricultural and non-agricultural activities is possible. After summarizing the changing characteristics of the diversification pursued by Japanese rural households since the nineteenth century, the paper seeks to demonstrate that technical and organizational change in agriculture and rural industry can be seen as conditioning each other to produce the inter-connected structure of flexible manufacturing and small-scale, ‘part-time’ farming on which the significant role of the rural sector in Japan's economic growth has been based. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the implementation of the production tests in permafrost and offshore regions in Canada, US, Japan, and China, the study of natural gas hydrate has progressed into the stage of technology development for industrial exploitation. The depressurization method is considered as a better strategy to produce gas from hydrate reservoirs based on production tests and laboratory experiments. Multi‐well production is proposed to improve gas production efficiency, to meet the requirement for industrial production. For evaluating the applicability of multi‐well production to hydrate exploitation, a 2D model is established, with numerical simulations of the performance of the multi‐well pattern carried out. To understand the dissociation behavior of gas hydrate, the pressure and temperature distributions in the hydrate reservoir are specified, and the change in permeability of reservoir sediments is investigated. The results obtained indicate that multi‐well production can improve the well connectivity, accelerate hydrate dissociation, enhance gas production rate and reduce water production as compared with single‐well production. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Agriculture's role in development has traditionally been seen to be a provider of things to the modern industrial sector. In this paper it is argued that those countries which historically have succeeded as those which have, at least for some time period, nurtured agriculture. Bates has pointed out that this was the case for English agriculture and this paper argues that it was also the case for Japan during both the Tokugawa and Meiji periods. Japanese colonization of Korea and Taiwan assured that agriculture was also protected, at least prior to World War II, in these latter two countries. Finally, this paper argues that the key role of agriculture in industrialization is in terms of providing a growing market for manufactured goods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper performs a cointegration analysis using an Error Correction Model (ECM) on annual rice prices to measure and compare market integration in China and Japan during the nineteenth century. We find markets in Japan were more integrated than in China at both the regional and national levels during the period. Moreover, market integration in Japan improved during industrialisation. These findings support the view that a well-integrated market is a cause as well as a result of economic growth. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Late-developing countries often adopt best practice technologies pioneered abroad, facilitating convergence toward leading economies. Meiji Japan (1868-1912) is one successful example of industrial convergence, but much of the evidence relies on national aggregates or selected industries. Using historical industry data, this paper examines whether Japan adopted new technologies faster compared to the United States. Contrary to conventional wisdom, new sectors did not appear relatively sooner in Japan, however, they did grow to economic significance faster. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper surveys research findings since the early 1970s, focusing on the growth processes of both traditional and modern industries and their relations with government activity in the period between the 1870s and 1940. Most of the surveyed research can be seen as a response to two theses: first, that pre-1940 Japan was essentially a market-led economy; and second, that the traditional sector did not decline in the industrialisation process, but in fact prospered. The survey argues that there were a good deal of interactions between the modern and traditional sectors at regional levels and that the regional economy occupied a significant place in the ways in which government business relations were structured. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on some aspects of industrialization and the convergence of contemporary Japan. Thus, this paper examines some of the aspects of change in Japan since the end of the Pacific War, specifically; changes associated with the ways men are managed in the modern sector of the Japanese economy. More recently, some writers have developed the relationship between technology and change. Their examination of the problems of labor and management in economic growth is rooted in the relatively common effects of common technologies in all developing economies. They emerge with a "convergence hypothesis" which argues that almost everywhere the world is in the grip of industrialization. This study takes technology as central in industrialization. Japan remains the only nonwestern nation which can be said to be industrialized. The streets of Japan's major cities are almost as choked with motor traffic as any American city of comparable size. Television antennas obstruct and mar the beauty of Japanese architecture. Yet, by no means can it be said that Japan is a western nation since many vestiges of pre-industrial Japan are readily apparent. Japanese tend to view themselves and their institutions as unique, a view that appears to be shared by many western scholars.

The article focuses on the preparations for economic growth in Japan. The author remarks that while the main outlines of Japanese economic development during the period since the Restoration are now rather firmly blocked out, current interest in comparative development during the pre-take-off period of the growth process makes it worthwhile to re-examine the previous era, the Japanese Tokugawa period. According to him the recognition of the preparatory role of Tokugawa is seldom perceived and certainly not stressed in previous studies. Some notion of the importance of Tokugawa glimmered in the literature for years. In this article the author seeks to move away from the ambivalent treatment of Tokugawa and to assemble some of the more important factors indicating the high economic levels attained by Japan in the Tokugawa period which prepared her for the take-off of 1868. He focuses on the covering materials on population, agriculture, production, institutional changes effecting savings and growth potentials, manufacturing and trade, both internal and external.

During the interwar years, Japanese industrialization accelerated alongside the expansion of industrial exports to regional markets. Trade blocs in the interwar years were used as an instrument of imperial power to foster exports and as a substitute for productivity to encourage industrial production. The historiography on Japanese industrialization in the interwar years describes heavy industries' interests in obtaining access to wider markets to increase economies of scale and reduce unit costs. However, this literature provides no quantitative evidence that proves the success of those mechanisms in expanding exports. In this article we scrutinize how Japan—a relatively poor country—used colonial as well as informal power interventions to expand regional markets for its exports, especially for the most intensive human capital sector of the industrializing economy. Our results show that Japanese exports in 1938 would have been around one‐third smaller had no empire ever existed, which indicates an outstanding effect of empire in the international context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Several drowsiness detection technologies have been developed to combat traffic accidents. Drowsiness evaluation has been attempted using the time‐series changes in nasal skin temperature. However, constructing a detection model based on this has been difficult because recent studies have reported an individual difference in skin temperature behaviors. In this study, the conventional method of extracting features was revised. The model of the level of drowsiness was constructed based on facial skin temperature distribution using a convolutional neural network (CNN). The drowsiness level was developed by the New Energy and Industrial Technology Development Organization as an objective drowsiness evaluation index based on facial expressions. With CNNs, features related to learning can be observed as feature quantity distributions. As a result, a general model created has a lack of generality and it is thought that not only the response to drowsiness, but also face shape, exhibit individual differences. Consequently, different features were found in each subject. Through feature maps in individual models, it is believed that skin temperature changes have both reproducible and individual response characteristics to drowsiness, due to the asymmetric left–right change in feature quantity distribution depending on the observed drowsiness level. This method was compared with the conventional method of extracting other features related to drowsiness. It suggested that the skin temperature of not only the nasal region but also the entire face changes as drowsiness increases. Consequently, each discrimination rate calculated by the CNN was at least 20% higher than that obtained via conventional methods. © 2019 Institute of Electrical Engineers of Japan. Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article focuses on the development of the Japanese medical instrument industry from the 1880s to the beginning of the war against China (1937). It argues that the growth of this industry relied on the adaptation of Western technologies to the Japanese environment. The article focuses on the learning processes adopted by Japanese entrepreneurs, revealing a major difference between small enterprises, engaged in innovation based on reverse engineering and cooperation with medical doctors, on the one hand, and large firms which benefitted from organisational facilities acquired through international technology transfer and cooperation with domestic R&D centres, on the other hand. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scholars are mainly concerned about how policy makers in advanced countries have succeeded in dualizing labour market regulations in a way to realize their vision or to represent powerful industrial interests. However, Japan's recent experiences suggest the possibility that this dualization is not such a straightforward outcome. This study argues that as Japan's political entrepreneurs have undergone setbacks in their reform attempt to overcome the tradition of employment dualism, they have improvised to close the reform process by institutionalizing this tradition. This study corroborates the argument by investigating state-industry conflicts over the revisions of the Worker Dispatch Law in 1999, 2003 and 2012. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

National material stock (MS) accounts have been a neglected field of analysis in industrial ecology, possibly because of the difficulty in establishing such accounts. In this research, we propose a novel method to model national MS based on historical material flow data. This enables us to avoid the laborious data work involved with bottom-up accounts for stocks and to arrive at plausible levels of stock accumulation for nations. We apply the method for the United States and Japan to establish a proof of concept for two very different cases of industrial development. Looking at a period of 75 years (1930-2005), we find that per capita MS has been much higher in the United States for the entire period, but that Japan has experienced much higher growth rates throughout, in line with Japan's late industrial development. By 2005, however, both Japan and the United States arrive at a very similar level of national MS of 310 to 375 tonnes per capita, respectively. This research provides new insight into the relationship between MS and flows in national economies and enables us to extend the debate about material efficiency from a narrow perspective of throughput to a broader perspective of stocks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An intrinsic feature of a pre-modern society is in its fragmentary markets. Fragmentary markets are more likely to fail in the coordination of resource allocation. However, if a concentrated market is exogenously formed and the market could provide the only price to local markets, the market can work as a pivot of coordination for development. Treaty port markets imposed on nineteenth-century Japan worked as the pivot and ignited Japan's industrialization. We examine the silk-reeling industry, which was the major export industry and which led to Japanese industrialization, and the role of treaty ports in its development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Large family-owned conglomerates known as zaibatsu have long been credited with leading Japanese industrialization during the Meiji period (1868-1912), despite a lack of empirical analysis. Using a new dataset collected from corporate genealogies to estimate entry probabilities, it is found that characteristics associated with zaibatsu increase a firm's likelihood of being an industry pioneer. In particular, first entry probabilities increase with industry diversification and private ownership, which may provide internal financing and risk-sharing, respectively. Nevertheless, the costs of excessive diversification may deter additional pioneering, which may account for the loss of zaibatsu technological leadership by the turn of the century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Unlike other colonial economies, Korea industrialised rapidly during its colonial period, which past scholars attributed to the industrialisation policy directed by the Japanese colonial government between 1930 and 1945. Our analysis of factory labour productivity from 1913 to 1937 suggests significant revisions to this claim. Factory labour productivity as well as total production grew rapidly before the active intervention of the colonial government. In addition, Korean entrepreneurs invested heavily in their firms and successfully competed with Japanese entrepreneurs. We conjecture that the pre-war experience of Korean entrepreneurs provided a critical foundation for the post-colonial economic growth. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

East Asian industrialisation has shown that modern industry has occurred across different cultures under a variety of factor-endowment conditions. The global history of the diffusion of industrialisation over the past two centuries suggests two distinct routes. The first is the ‘Western path’ associated with capital- and energy-intensive industry. The second path to creating a modern industrial economy is the ‘East Asian path’ based on labour-intensive industrialisation that has built on quality labour resources cultivated in the traditional sector. This was the path followed by Japan from the nineteenth century and by many other countries in Asia during the twentieth century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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This study examines intergenerational class mobility in Japan using cross-national comparisons with Western nations and cross-temporal comparisons of five national surveys conducted in postwar Japan. Cross-national comparisons highlight the similarity in relative mobility pattern between Japan and Western nations and at the same time the Japanese distinctiveness in absolute mobility rates especially regarding the demographic character of the Japanese manual working class. The results of cross-temporal comparisons of mobility pattern report some systematic trends in total mobility, inflow and outflow rates, reflecting the Japanese experience of late but rapid industrialization. The pattern of association between class origin and class destination, however, was stable in postwar Japan. It is therefore the combination of distinctive absolute mobility rates and similar relative mobility rates that characterizes the Japanese mobility pattern in comparison with the Western experience. Furthermore, Japan's distinctive pattern of postwar social mobility is characterized by a combination of rapidly changing absolute mobility rates and comparatively stable relative mobility rates. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present study analyses the character of hierarchical relations of personal dependence in Brazil, Mexico, and Japan, in an attempt to reveal their differences and implications, and, indirectly, to explain the lack of recourse to such relationships for purposes of modernization in the Latin American settings, in contradistinction to Japan. The detailed analysis shows that whereas in Japan hierarchical personalized trust contributed to societal trust, in Latin America it recreated existing uncertainties and weakened broader institutional trust. The combined perspectives of macro- and micro-analysis shed light on the comparative brittleness of hierarchical trust in Latin America. The analysis suggests that the interpersonal tendencies characteristic of each setting are related both to institutional frameworks and to images of self-fulfilment peculiar to the societies in question. It is argued that it is the fragility of hierarchical trust in Mexico and Brazil that has contributed to the reformulation of patron-client relations following processes of change, i.e., industrialization, capitalistic penetration, and political modernization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article examines the effect of technology on the internationalization of socialist and capitalist relations. Organizational life and culture in two electrical engineering firms, one located in Japan and the other in England, are described and compared. Various aspects of the two companies' are considered, including recruitment, training, employment system, and industrial relations. The codification and diffusion of knowledge within each organization is analyzed, and the comparatively advantageous ability of Japanese firms to adopt and adapt available western technologies is described.

Among various factors contributing to the economic success of the Japanese, the use of military-like strategies has been recently cited by scholars, prominent journalists, and politicians in the united States. Some of them are now advocating retaliation through the use of similar military-type methods. However, will the American companies and their government be able to do this successfully? A lot depends on a clear appreciation of some of the fundamental principles underlying the use of military strategies to business practices. This article seeks to highlight and explain why military-type strategies are more applicable to Japanese than American companies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The relationship of state policy to economic growth in such countries as Japan, South Korea, Taiwan and Singapore has been appreciated by some social scientists for quite some time while; Hong Kong seemed to be the deviant case. The article focuses on economic growth in Hong Kong, which was also predicated on substantial state intervention. However, state ownership of land, the provision of collective consumption, and the supply of basic commodities by the People's Republic of China, at less than market prices, are the defining characteristics. Although many commentators have noted the advantages of Hong Kong's geographical position in aiding rapid industrialization, her political status may have been equally important. Because it is administering a colony, Hong Kong's government has been able to avoid the types of political pressures that have often led to mushrooming public sectors, disproportionate investment in "non-productive" activities and resultant financial difficulties in many third world countries.

The article focuses on the Japanese Technopolis programme. The programme is designed to boost national innovation by creating centres of new technology, industry and research and development. The Technopolis programme is the latest attempt at regional development planning and policy in Japan. The programme is aimed at promoting industrial development by raising the technological level of local business and establishing new high technology industry; encouraging research and development to ensure sustained regional development; and creating attractive communities in which people can live and work. The first problem confronting the Technopolis plan is the bandwagon effect which accompanies programmes that award special status to places. A second deficiency of the Technopolis programme is the assumption that the success of a high-tech centre is tied to high levels of university-based research and development. Technopolis programme is the long-standing concentration of premier universities and corporate headquarters in Tokyo. The fact that a number of the existing concentrations of high-tech industry in Japan have failed to engender new industrial complexes suggests that high tech industry, with a few historic exceptions, does not in-and-of-itself foster the development of industrial agglomerations.

Rural suicide rates are higher than urban suicide rates in industrialized Japan in contrast to the traditional pattern of higher urban suicide rates found in the West. The pattern is attributed to areal differences in social disintegration. This explanation is operationalized for Japan and tested empirically using data (1979-198 1) on 47 prefectures. Higher suicide rates are observed in areas with a sparse population, a stagnant economy, and a population over-represented by elderly people. The explanatory power of the structural variables in the present study is also tested for each decade since 1960. These variables are found to be increasingly effective in predicting suicide rates as industrialization proceeds. Variation in social integration, rather than the degree of industrialization and urbanization, is the key to understanding the differentials in suicide rates. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Provides information on a study which reviewed the mutual interactions between socio-cultural forces and the development of management in Japan. Changes during the process of industrialization; Cultural changes which addressed issues of universalism and particularism in the process.

Japan has undergone tremendous economic and social changes. The prodigious economic growth of the 1960's has lifted Japan to third place among highly industrialized countries in terms of its gross national product. Technological innovations in industrial processes and production which have contributed to this economic development have become so widespread as to include even the process of management, and the introduction of various modern managerial techniques is making Japan into a computerized managerial society. According to the 1965 census, about 70 per cent of the total population of 98 million lives in cities, and 45 out of every 100 persons are concentrated in greater Tokyo, Japan, whose population increased by 5.5 million between 1955 and 1965. Urbanization at this speed and on such a scale has brought with it, in both urban and rural areas, many serious problems which lead to changes in the traditional outlook and customs, and, above all, in social and cultural values. The rise of new generations, the popularization of higher education, widespread ownership of television sets, etc., have contributed to these changes.