Acceptance of the Term “Kombinat” in Japan

Abstract

The term “kombinat” (комбинат in Russian; “combine” in English), which is also significant in economic geography, has been well established in Japan for a long time. However, the process of accepting the term in Japan has never been fully examined. The purpose of this paper is to clarify its acceptance. For this analysis, the present paper adopts a new approach toward the term kombinat, classifying it as either special or general, and examines its acceptance in two periods: before and after World War II. Kombinat is also a foreign word of Latin origin for the Russian language that was frequently used in various senses from the post-revolutionary period to the time of the early Soviet Union. This paper mainly examines industrial (mining and manufacturing) production, which was important in the acceptance of the term in Japan. In the pre-World War II period, the early stage of acceptance, both special and general kombinats were planned and formed in the Soviet Union, including the renaming of former manufactories to kombinats. Among them, special kombinats, especially the Ural-Kuznetsk kombinat, attracted a great deal of attention in not only the Soviet Union, the source side, but also Japan, the recipient side. The militarization of Japanese society also increased interest in the kombinats that were developing in the eastern part of the Soviet Union. On the other hand, during the postwar period, the latter stage of acceptance, to reconstruct the economy and promote heavy chemical industrialization in Japan, general kombinats were introduced as part of industrial policy and as business projects of petrochemical companies, although some aftereffects were observed from the previous period’s acceptance. In the 1950s, general kombinats were actually planned and formed in Japan, and in the 1960s, kombinat became a popular term. The current acceptance of the term kombinat in Japan, which is based on the definitions of major dictionaries and encyclopedias, can be pointed out as being characterized by relating the general kombinat in Japan to the special one in the Soviet Union without distinguishing between them. Such acceptance was strongly influenced by the socioeconomic circumstances of the source and recipient sides, especially the latter. The acceptance of kombinat from circa 1946 to the mid-1950s, and the way in which kombinat has been treated in geography education in Japan, should be examined in the future.