Abstract
The shipbuilding industry in this country has remarkably developed after the World War II under the state monopolistic-capitalist systems, and occupied more than 44% (as of 1965) in the world production. The shipbuilding industry is a kind of assembly industries and needs various associated factories of sub-contraction, which often varies more than 200.
The main purpose in the present series of studies, to which this paper corresponds to the first one, is to make clear the locational distribution of the subcontract system by several shipyards. Fairly remarkable differences by economic regions will be pointed out, and then the author would try to explain these economic geographical backgrounds for some regional diversities of Japanese shipbuilding industry.
The Shimizu area, one shipbuilding region, situated about 150km west of Tokyo, was chosen as the suitable area for the intensive investigation. In this paper, the author took the largest shipbuilding yard in this area, the N, Company, which was one of the seven monopolistic undertakings in Japan, and researched the situation of its subcontract system and its regional characteristics.
The results were obtained as follows:
1. The reason for the shipbuilding capital to adopt the subcontract system, is nothing but to achieve the maximum profits.
2. There are two main ways, however, for this purpose. The first one is to introduce the Shagaiko system; the Shagaiko means the employees of subcontracted enterprises who are compelled under the worse labor conditions in terms of both qualification and wages. The second way is to utilize the associated factories of sub-contraction.
3. In the Shimizu area, the associated subcontract plants have not yet fully developed to fulfil the demands of the Shimlzu shipbuilding yard. Then the yard has had to depend on smaller associated plants located in the Tokyo Yokohama industrial area.
4. In the less industrialized area as the Shimizu area, the regional characteristics of subcontract system lie in the externality of the developing-process of the yard, in- other words, in the dependence on the external region.
