This paper analyzes the international competitiveness of the Japanese shipbuilding industry from the end of the 1950s to the early 1960s. The predominant view is that Japanese shipbuilders steadily improved their building efficiency after the Second World War and eventually obtained the largest share of the world market by garnering a good reputation for strict observance of delivery time. Indeed, since 1956, Japan had ranked first in terms of the total gross tonnage of merchant vessels launched in the world, and held this position until 1999. However, many previous studies have assumed, without sufficient evidence, that Japanese shipbuilders and other shipbuilders competed to obtain orders in the same market. Moreover, it is doubtful that labour efficiency in the shipbuilding industry in Japan was much higher than in the Western European countries in the 1950s and the early 1960s. This means that we need to look for factors other than labour efficiency to explain how Japanese firms succeeded in obtaining orders. This article challenges the common supposition. In fact, Japanese shipbuilders received foreign orders from emerging Greece owners and the Western European shipbuilders got orders from the U.K. and Norway. The evidence demonstrates that Japanese and Western European shipbuilders' markets were generally unrelated_they each had different sets of customers during this period. Previous studies have also asserted that Japanese shipbuilding grew because it was far superior to that of Western European countries in its ability to expand oil tanker capacity. However, such a conclusion disregards the practices of the shipbuilding industry: large vessels were built along specifications required by customers rather than simply built by shipbuilders on the anticipation of an order. There has been little discussion of the possibility that Western European shipbuilders did not need to expand the capacity of their oil tankers simply because the specifications from their customers did not request this. Little attention has been paid to the relationship between tanker size and the actual navigation routes used. The data indicates that Japanese domestic shipowners were the only customers in the world that required constant expansion in their oil tanker sizes due to the fact that they did not navigate the Suez Canal. By examining these points, this article provides new explanations for the growth of the Japanese shipbuilding industry from the end of 1950s to the early 1960s that more accurately reflect the specific characteristics of the shipbuilding industry and the available empirical data.

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The purpose of this article is to substantiate the effects of industrial clusters on constituent individual factories, focusing on the case of the machinery industry in Tokyo in the late Meiji Era. Recently, while the role of small and medium-sized factories in the development of the Japanese economy has come to be evaluated positively, it has also been recognized that many, especially small and medium-sized, factories often formed clusters. Therefore, it is important to investigate the effects of clusters on their constituent factories in order to understand the mechanism of economic development. For this purpose, I use a comprehensive list of factories which covers small and medium-sized factories dating back to the early stages of industrialization. There are principally two conceptual frameworks on industrial clustering. The one focuses on quantitative agglomeration of firms in general, and the other focuses on "flexible specialization" in addition to quantitative agglomeration. In this paper, I use the former framework to examine the broad effects of industrial clusters, such as information sharing, formation of skilled labor market, and development of related industries. First, I analyze quantitatively the influences of clustering, using the panel data constructed from five lists of factories issued in 1904, 1906, 1909, 1911 and 1916. Through this analysis, I show that the establishment of factories was more active inside clusters, factories tended to move out of clusters when they expanded their business, and survivability of factories was higher inside the clusters. Then, I investigate the reasons for these phenomena using descriptive materials, and I conclude that "gathering effects" such as "flexible specialization", a skilled labor market, related industries and the sharing of information played an important role, which was backed by the historical environment of high worker mobility and little transactional relationship between large and small factories.

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Japan experienced its first sharp decline in the trend of rice prices after WWII, and consequently it is important to establish the factors behind this event. This paper, focusing on changes in consumer demand for rice and the development of labor adjustment in the national economy, makes ample use of statistical data to examine the factors behind the decline in the price of rice from the latter half of the 1990s. First, the portion of the change in rice consumption from the latter half of the 1990s to the first half of the 2000s that can be attributed to broad adjustments in the labor market was determined. From this analysis, it became clear that the first post-war long-term fall in both wage levels and numbers of workers was taking place; that this decline was heavily biased towards the construction, manufacturing, logistics and service industries at the level of the small- and medium-sized enterprise; and from analysis of the "Family Income and Expenditure Survey" that the impact of this labor adjustment was biased towards the members of the lower income classes. Low-income classes were most affected by labor adjustment. Further, I establish that from the latter half of the 1990s, reducing income levels lead to lower-income classes spending less on rice, and the difference with the price of rice paid by higher-income classes increased. The implication is that reducing income levels of the lower-income classes strengthened the tendency to lower prices of rice. Additionally, it is clearly established that the increase in the take-out/eating out consumption pattern is a factor in the reducing price of rice. The reason is that the use of blended rice by the take-out/eating out industry makes it easier to establish a cheap rice consumption pattern among consumers. Through my analysis, I clearly show that the reduction in the price of rice is not a matter of factors internal to the agricultural industry, but is due rather to external factors, in particular the impact of labor adjustment on consumers and the corresponding changes in their consumption patters. The price of rice thus entered a new phase in the period from the latter half of the 1990s.

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The horse industry in modern Japan was consistently lead by military demand for military horses; however the interwar period should be considered. In this period, armaments reduction decreased the political and economic influence of the Army on the horse industry. The purpose of this paper is to clarify how the maintenance of military horses was practiced in the period, and especially how it was related to simultaneous advances in the streamlining of agricultural management. Through analysis of data regarding the Tohoku region, the main source of horse stock in Japan, this study makes clear the following two points. 1) The policy of the horse industry in the inter-war period was to create a demand for militarily-required "improved-horses", in farmers' horse breeding. Due to armaments reduction, the Army was no longer able to maintain military horses by itself. Therefore, it intended to entrust their maintenance to the Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry by replacing military demand for horses with that of farmers. 2) To carry out this policy, technicians of the Ministry encouraged farmers to increase the use of horses. This was intended to increase their income brought from work performed by horses, and to make them keep improved-horses while streamlining agricultural management. But it was only large farmers that implemented this plan. In contrast, small farmers refused to accept this policy, because their scale of management was too small to exercise the abilities of the improved-horses. Instead, they requested to streamline their management systems by using ponies, which cost less than improved-horses but were not required for military purposes. Nevertheless, their request could not be realized as the use of stallions to produce ponies was prohibited by law. As a result, small farmers were forced to keep improved-horses uneconomically. The supply of many military horses in the following war period would not have been possible without their sacrifice.

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