1991 Volume 56 Issue 6 Pages 762-790,861
This paper analyses the roles played by the Japanese Navy and the Mitsubishi Shipyard at Nagasaki in introducing the marine steam turbine into the Japanese shipbuilding industry at the turn of the 20th century. In previous studies analysing the process of heavy industrialization in Japan since the Russo-Japanese War, technological innovations, despite their avowed importance, tended to be treated, explicitly or implicitly, as given. The present paper scrutinising the process of technology transfer which enabled one of the most drastic product innovations in the shipbuilding industry to take place, will provide a valuable perspective for reconsidering the nature of the so-called Japanese "success" in the area of technology transfer. A couple of points are made : (1) The Japanese Navy played a tactical role embodying a form of rational behaviour in that it intervened in the process of prior inquiries and examination and selection of different types of technology up to their introduction after which, in contrast, it mainly let them take root by the invisible hand of the market ; (2) The Mitsubishi Shipyard at Nagasaki, by contrast, played an entrepreneur-like role irreducible to rational behaviour in that it tried to construct the first turbine ship in Japan domestically even before the Japanese Navy's actions had been completed. These two different roles formed a unique structure of technology transfer which had until then taken place through the personal network of those engineers who graduated from the Imperial University of Tokyo, and without such a structure, "late comers' advantages" could not have been effected. Thus one of the most neglected reasons for an instance of Japanese economic "success" maybe relate to the structure of technology transfer itself without which most versions of the "catch-up" theory referring to Japan as a model might lack relevance.
