The Organization of a Sawmill Industrial Area in Postwar Japan

The Case of the Shimizu Port Lumber Industry Cooperative

Abstract

This paper elucidates the historical conditions behind the development of cooperative activity through the use of a case study in the Japanese sawmill industry, one of the industries that helped drive the country’s rapid postwar economic growth. Past business-history studies on conditions in Europe have shown that products from cooperatives initially struggled to carve out a market share, with large-scale businesses seeing little benefit in joining cooperatives’ ranks, and that cooperatives eventually began to develop when countries rolled out far-reaching subsidy policies after World War II. This paper, however, presents a case in which the leadership of large-scale businesses and the followership of smaller businesses propelled the growth of a cooperative that engaged in collective purchasing and marketing. In the postwar Japanese sawmill industry, it was autonomous corporate coordination, not national subsidy policy, that nurtured cooperative activity. The paper thus adds to the existing scholarship by highlighting a new development pattern for cooperatives.