Author(s): | Mosk, Carl |
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Reviewer(s): | Metzler, Mark |
Published by EH.NET (January 2002)
Carl Mosk, Japanese Industrial History: Technology, Urbanization, and
Economic Growth. Armonk, NY and London: M. E. Sharpe, 2001. xviii + 293
pp. $68.95 (cloth), ISBN: 0-7656-0700-X; $26.95 (paper), ISBN: 0-7656-0701-8.
Reviewed for EH.NET by Mark Metzler, Department of History, Oakland
University.
In less than 300 pages, Carl Mosk, veteran economic historian and demographer
and Professor of Economics at the University of Victoria, has put together an
ambitious and original synthesis of Japanese economic history that spans the
period from the seventeenth century to the mid twentieth century. Mosk returns
to the fundamental question of the sources of Japanese growth and in doing so
he opens up several new lines of inquiry. The results provide valuable
material for further analysis and debate, and, as Mosk suggests, may be widely
applicable to the experience of other countries.
Japanese Industrial History is really two, or perhaps three, books in
one. First, it is an account of Japanese growth set within a framework of
economic long swings. Second, it is an analysis of the geography of growth in
the Tokaido industrial belt, taking the city of Osaka as its primary subject.
Finally, employing this chronological and geographical framework, Mosk surveys
Japan’s modern industrial and urban history in general. Mosk ties together
these analytical threads with six propositions concerning what he calls
“infrastructure-driven growth” (pp. xv, 7-23). First, he gives Japanese long
swings a Schumpeterian character as “wave[s] of innovation, imitation, and
creative destruction.” Second, investment in infrastructure — “physical,
human capital enhancing, and financial” — laid the groundwork for industrial
expansion in the upswing phases of these long swings. Third, the national and
local governments acted as “coordinating and facilitating” agents in creating
infrastructure. Fourth, this long-swing development “followed a domestic logic
tempered by global circumstances.” Fifth, “the efficiency of infrastructure
investment . . . was enhanced by the concentration of infrastructure
investment and manufacturing in the Tokaido industrial belt” that stretches
from Kobe and Osaka in the west to Yokohama and Tokyo in the east. Finally,
the core of this core region shifted over the period in question from Osaka to
Tokyo.
Mosk’s focus on Osaka, with its complex layering of infrastructure and
“remarkable density of diversity,” seems especially well chosen to this
admittedly Osakaphilic reviewer. First, Osaka and its region formed the
economic “core of the core,” as Mosk puts it, as late as the 1910s. Second,
most modern economic-historical accounts are Tokyo-centric, and much is gained
from shifting the standard point of view. The focus on infrastructure and the
slicing of time into long-swing periods are also highly original and
effective. The analytical pay-offs of this approach appear throughout Mosk’s
study, which begins with an introductory chapter on the Tokugawa period and
then concentrates on what Mosk calls the “balanced growth” long swing of
1887-1904 and the “transitional” and “unbalanced growth” long swings of
1904-1930 and 1930-1938. Chapters that survey the themes of infrastructure,
factories, and cities, offering many valuable insights, round out the book.
Mosk’s long-swing chronology, derived from the econometric work of Ohkawa
Kazushi and associated contributors to the Long-Term Economic Statistics
project,1 is as follows: Balanced-growth long swing: upswing, 1887-1897;
downswing, 1897-1904 Transitional-growth long swing: first upswing,
1904-1911; second upswing, 1911-1919; downswing, 1919-1930
Unbalanced-growth long swing: upswing, 1930-1938 Mosk considers the
World War II era as an exceptional interruption to the growth process rather
than as part of a post-1938 downswing. A renewed upswing comes with the era of
high-speed growth, from 1953 to 1969. This dating of long swings is taken as
an initial starting point rather than argued through in detail. It also
contains problems that deserve some attention. For one, different analysts
(e.g., Nishikawa and Abe, 1990) have given somewhat different datings.2 Also
problematic is the characterization of the decade after the Russo-Japanese War
of 1904-05, which is identified as part of an upswing in both long-swing
chronologies. Here, apparently calculating from seven-year moving averages,
Mosk gives average per annum GDP growth for the “first upswing” of 1904-11 as
2.6%, which barely exceeds the average rate of 2.5% for the downswing of
1919-30 (Table 4.1, p. 120). He also shows that gross national expenditure and
disposable income per capita actually grew faster during the downswing of the
1920s than during the supposed upswing phase of 1904-11. If a different
reference period is chosen (say, 1907-1914), much of this “upswing” looks even
more like a downswing, indicating why scholars such as Nagaoka Shinkichi
(1971) have characterized the phase after 1907 as one of chronic recession.3
The use of moving averages here can be misleading, as it averages the
extraordinary growth of the World War I era with the very slow growth of the
several years immediately preceding the war. This is one point that suggests
how Mosk’s long-swing analysis could benefit by being articulated with an
account of shorter-term business cycles.
There are also problems with the attribution to infrastructure of the status
of prime mover, a claim that is not always fully argued in the context of
competing explanations. For instance, were infrastructure limitations really a
leading factor in the relative stagnation of the 1920s? Or is the slowdown
better explained, as many people explained it at the time, as a matter of
excess capacity and bad debts following the great wartime boom, exacerbated by
postwar deflation and an overvalued exchange rate? A broader problem is Mosk’s
definition of the term infrastructure itself, which at some points
seems to encompass the whole social and political order. Thus, Mosk concludes
that “the [Tokugawa] bakuhan system collapsed because its entire
infrastructure was increasingly viewed as inadequate” (p. 51). Or, in the
1920s, problems of credit creation are subsumed under the rubric of
infrastructure (p. 125). All the same, the infrastructure thesis is on the
whole convincing, and by deploying it so fully, Mosk is able to offer readers
a range of fresh perspectives.
Finally, a few words of criticism are in order from the standpoint of visual
communication. For a work of economic geography, there are few maps, and none
of them is very detailed. One wishes that the publisher had seen fit to
include not only a set of richly detailed maps but also a set of photographs
and other illustrations. The beautiful frontispiece of Osaka in 1924,
apparently reduced from a very large original, is more decorative than
functional and deserves to be reproduced in sections at an enlarged scale and
given detailed analytical attention. As it is, the reader who is unfamiliar
with Japan or even the reader unfamiliar with Osaka will find it difficult to
visualize many of the places and processes under discussion, rendering the
discussion unnecessarily abstract. Unless one sees it, for example, it is hard
to comprehend the sheer scale of the great Keihin (Tokyo-Kawasaki-Yokohama)
industrial complex, not to mention its density, which is probably without
parallel anywhere in the world, nor is it easy to grasp the character of
Osaka’s Nanba and Umeda complexes with which Mosk begins his account. With the
appropriate visual devices added, Japanese Industrial History could
double as a superior text for undergraduate courses in Japanese or
international economic history. A brief appendix summarizing the basic
national production statistics that Mosk relies on would also have been
useful. As it is, only tables giving moving averages for predefined long-swing
periods are given, leaving a considerable amount of legwork for readers who
might want to consider alternative ways of reading the evidence.
These are criticisms meant to suggest the value of the book. In the end,
Japanese Industrial History very usefully raises many more questions
than it answers. Mosk’s analytical narrative is big enough, rich enough, and
open-ended enough to make one hope for more — a future revised edition or
major follow-on volume. It would be especially valuable to carry Mosk’s
infrastructure-centered analysis into the post-World War II period, when Japan
has undergone what has surely been one of the greatest campaigns of building
(and overbuilding) of infrastructure ever seen.
Notes: 1. Ohkawa Kazushi, et al., Choki keizai tokei, 1, Kokumin shotoku
[Long-term economic statistics: National income]. Tokyo: Toyo Keizai
Shinposha, 1974. The long-swing schema is laid out on pp. 14-19.
2. Nishikawa Shunsaku and Abe Takeshi, “Gaisetsu, 1885-1914 nen” [Outline,
1885-1914]. In Nishikawa and Abe, editors, Sangyoka no jidai (jo), Vol.
4 of Nihon keizai shi, Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1990, pp. 1-77. Their
dating of long swings is as follows: upswing, 1883-1892; downswing, 1892-1903;
upswing, 1903-1917; downswing, 1917-1928; upswing, 1928-1936.
3. Nagaoka Shinkichi, Meiji kyokoshi josetsu [Introduction to the
history of Meiji-era depressions]. Tokyo: Tokyo Daigaku Shuppankai, 1971.
Mark Metzler is assistant professor of Japanese history at Oakland
University. When in Japan, he makes his home in Osaka. He is currently
completing a book, Global Money and the Crisis of Liberalism, on the
gold standard and its collapse in early twentieth century Japan.
Subject(s): | Industry: Manufacturing and Construction |
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Geographic Area(s): | Asia |
Time Period(s): | 20th Century: Pre WWII |