The Role of Tradition in Japan's Industrialization

Masayuki Tanimoto is Associate Professor of Economic History at the Graduate School of Economics, University of Tokyo. He is currently an academic visitor at the London School of Economics. In 1998, he was awarded the Nikkei Economic Book Prize.

• INTRODUCTION ; 1. The Role of Tradition in Japan's Industrialization: Another Path to Industrialization ; 2. The Development of Traditional Industries in Modern Japan: A Statistical Exposition ; TRADITION IN INDUSTRIALIZATION ; 3. The Role of "Early Factories" in Japanese Industrialization ; 4. Dualism in the Silk Reeling Industry in Suwa from the 1910s to the 1930s ; 5. Factory Girls in an Agrarian Setting circa 1910 ; 6. The Humble Origins of Modern Japan's Machine Industry ; 7. How Local Trade Associations and Manufacturers' Associations Worked in Pre-war Japan ; THE MODERNIZATION OF LOCAL INDUSTIES ; 8. The Rise of the Factory Industry: Silk Reeling in the Suwa District ; 9. The Export-orientated Industrialization of Japanese Pottery: The Adoption and Adaptation of Overseas Technology and Market Information ; INDUSTRY AND REGIONAL COMMUNITY ; 10. The Development of a Rural Weaving Industry and its Social Capital ; 11. Communal Action in the Development of Regional Industrial Policy: A Case Study of the Kawamata Silk Weaving Industry ; 12. Capital Accumulation and the Local Economy: Brewers and Local Notables

Deeply informed by regional and individual enterprise studies, this volume makes an impressive case for the importance of indigenous industry in Japan's early industrial development.