Assembled in Japan: Electrical Goods and the Making of the Japanese Consumer

Recently I had read the following book. The main points in the second half of the book are:

Book title: Partner, Simon. 2000. Assembled in Japan: Electrical Goods and the Making of the Japanese Consumer. Berkeley: University of California Press

Ch.6 talks about a final key to the prosperity in Japan. It was the cheap labor of the underprivileged classes, particularly the young women. Cheap labor was Japan’s traditional advantage. It was surprisingly appropriate to the manufacture of the transistor in radios and TV. Japan made the potable transistor radio a great export success.

- When MITI learned that Totsuko had signed a contract without its approval, a major fracas ensued. According to Morita, it showed that the MITI bureaucrats could not see the use of such a device and were not eager to grant permission of the transistors industry. But according to Partner, the real issue was MITI’s reluctance to authorize a small and relatively unknown company to spend precious foreign exchange on a technology that might not be exploited effectively. (197)

- In conclusion, the book suggests four key to Japan’s prosperity. The first was the media, in particular the broadcasting, they understood the importance of mass communication and succeeded in bring TV to Japanese much sooner. The second was technology; the 1950s witnessed a great wave of technology importation. The third theme was the domestic market; a broad consuming middle class in Japan was envisioned. The final theme was Japan’s advantage in low-cost labor. (228)

- Partner criticizes Chalmers Johnson for too much focusing on MITI’s virtuoso use of the specific group of tools, including foreign exchange, foreign capital control, direct government finance and tax incentives. Partner asserts that many of these tools had little relevant to electronic consumption. Banking arrangement played virtually no role in spurring Japan’s consumer electronic industry. (232). MITI seemed to have underrated the importance and potential of consumer electronic.  MITI’s policy towards the creation of a domestic television industry was ambiguous (232). The role of MITI was to suppress import of consumer-oriented technologies in favor of strategic industrial technologies such as chemical and machine tools. Television was consumer industry and could not be considered as strategic. In the end MITI did little more than following the trend of the market when it approved 37 companies to import television technology while originally 3 to 4 would be adequate. (233)

- Partner listed out three reasons for the importance of electrical goods in Japan’s postwar history. He quotes five essential components of the early postwar era as a golden age of economic growth. These included the economic and political hegemony of the US, the rapid development of new technologies, the free market economic, the spread of ‘Fordist’ production and management techniques and lastly a transnational system of manufacturing. (234)

- Why then did Japan acquire such a dominant role in global electrical goods market when other low-wage countries were unable to match this achievement? The answer was that Japanese companies could master product technology, quality control, marketing in order to benefit from this low wage advantage. (239)

- As Japanese companies had no domestic military market to fall back on, they put their best people into the development of consumer application. As early as 1962, Sony came out with the world’s first fully transistorized television. (240)

- Technology could be seen as an enabler. It depended on the process of growth and social changes.  Mass purchase of labor-saving goods such as washing machine was dependent on sufficient change in traditional family structure in order to make the labor of women worth saving. (241)

- Business leader were dependent on the availability of new technologies, and on the effects of those technologies on society for the success of their endeavors. The relationship among business, technology and social changes were dynamic, mutually dependent, and was as complex as the labyrinthine workings of history itself. (242)