From the mid-19th Century there appeared successive attempts at Utopian experiments of “Industrial Villages” by reformist factory-owners in northern and middle part of England. Take notable examples-Copley and Akroydon near Halifax, Saltaire near Bradford, Port Sunlight near Liverpool, Bournville near Birmingham and New Earswick near York. They were all run by successful non-conformist industriarists and two of them by Quakers (Bournville and New Earswick).
They were sometimes also called as “Company Towns” and some of them deserved the name. Yet, generally speaking, they did not for some reasons.
Above all, those industrialists did not adopt the tied housing policy like that of Japanese “Syataku.” In other words, some part of industrial villages were supplied to the local people nothing to do with the firm.
Chief reason for this policy can be found, I think, in their mental attitudes, or rather mental climate around them towards business. There is a natural tendency for bourgeois class in any country to change their target in life from business to status. But here in Britain, this tendency was strengthened by the fact that Britain was taking a strong lead in economic and industrial development and consequentry, once getting wealthy, they were unable to have a proper target in their way of life. So many of them were seeking value in getting higher status and behaving like big landowners, rather than like factory-owners. This was partly reflected in the styles adopted in building houses in industrial villages-Tudor Gothic, maybe a symbol of the past great age and also of the strong aristocracy, and also in accepting local people other than their employees to their villages.
Some other industriarists were eager to improve the position of their people in accordance with their religeous creed. But we should not miss the side trend of industrial scenes which, paradoxically enough for the age of progress, was imbued with medievalism.

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During the eighties and the early nineties, the world economy has undergone a structural metamorphosis. This has been caused by the loss of international competitiveness of the U. S. and the further strengthening of the Japanese economy. The growing trade deficit of the U. S. and the growing trade surplus of Japan are the most telling symptoms of this development.
The industrial structure of the U. S. has experienced the following alterations: falling relative importance of manufacturing in GDP; rising relative weight of agriculture; increasing relative share of the tertiary industries. Deindustrialization is a common phenomenon in every developed country, but that of the U. S. has gone not a little further than in other countries. The problem is that the American manufacturing industry has lost much of its international competitiveness, so that, even when there has been an increase in domestic demand, it has come to lack the capacity to meet it. Particularly the machinery and equipments industries have been affected. The result has been a large deficit in trade in manufactures. Moreover, manufacturing employment has diminished. On the other hand, the tertiary industries, which have enjoyed relative advantage, have further benefited from deregulations and have absorbed labor and capital. Thus, there has been a contrasting development between manufacturing and the services.
In stark contrast to the developments in the U. S., the relative weight of the manufacturing industries has risen in Japan. The tertiary industries have gained in importance in terms of their relative share of total employment, but in terms of their relative share of GDP their importance has not risen, but stagnated. The gain in importance of the manufacturing industries is a result of their increasing international competitiveness. Their exports, particularly the exports of machinery and equipments, have registered remarkable increases. On the other hand, the development of tertiary industries has been hampered by excessive regulations by the government and by irrational taxation system. As a consequence, there has resulted a tendency for overexpansion of the manufacturing industries, which have absorbed labor and capital from the other sectors of the economy. It is this overexpansion, which has generated surpluses for exports of their products.
These contrasting developments in the U. S. and Japan have now reached a phase of readjustment. In both the U. S. and Japan forces have been at work to remedy this extreme imbalance.

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With hopes for a sustainable economic growth in Asia, the mighty force leading the world's economy, the author has studied the petrochemical industries in East Asia, one of key factors in the Asian economy, looking into such issues as a history of formation and development of those industries for more than a decade since 1980, their in-region structural features, their dynamism, and development of their economic interdependence.
In this study, the author took a multinational, multiregional point of view, as if observing East Asia from a satellite aloft overhead, trying to analyze and digest the phenomena in multiple aspects.
This study eventually revealed the unique structure and behavior of the region's petrochemical industries: large demand and patterns oriented towards “economic interdependence”. The examinations have further confirmed that the interdependence became more definite in the former half of the 1990s and that the decisive factors in the industries' dynamic growth were, on the demand side, increases in great demand in China under a high economic growth and, on the supply side, increases in supply capacity created by competitive plant investment by Korean companies.
In the future, the most important factor that will govern the East Asian petrochemical industries' further dynamic growth would be the evolution of their interdependence; from the interdependence so far through importation/exportation of petrochemical producuts to closer interdependence through foreign direct investment by corporations either in out-of-region countries like Japan, the U. S. A., and European nations or in in-region countries. It can be said that those East Asian petrochemical industries entered a new stage in the latter half of the 1990s, just heading for the beginning of the 21st century.

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I reported on the future aspects of the Japanese steel industry in the general meeting of the Society for Industrial Studies, Japan. It was based on the structure and function of the steel industry system peculiar to Japan.
I also analyzed the drastic change of the Japanese steel industry today, and the direction of its realignment in the near future.
I described the details in my book titled ‘The Japanese Steel System; the Mechanism of crisis Management and the Perspective toward Reform’, published by Dobunkan Publishing Company in the spring of 1996. This book is a completion of my studies on the Japanese steel industry. In this thesis I will avoid overlapping the content of that work.
In my previous book I could not include the articles on the materials, technology and skills concerning the Japanese steel industry. These are to be organized individually, based on the concept of the steel production system and will be published in the form of other books.
By the way, I could glimpse the steel production system in the framework of the Japanese steel system. But there's much left to be examined theoretically.
So I will give carefull consideration to the steel production system that functions as a core in each company. Firstly I must make clear the concept of the production system before examining the Japanese production system. Furthermore I will take a close look at the steel production system as the sub-system of the Japanese steel system and make a re-alignment of its whole concept.
But I was unable to analyze the structure and function of the steel production system, still less refer to its historical position and the problem confronting it. Someday I'm sure to deepen my theory on them and deal with it in another book.

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A model of TV was born at Hamamatsu in Shizuoka Prefecture in 1935. Nowadays, TV receivers are produced by major manufacutures such as Toshiba and Hitachi and there is no such maker in Hamamatsu. Have TV tecniques ceased to exist in Hamamatsu? No; the development of TV continues in the field of optical sensors. The leader of this development is a maker named Hamamatsu Photonics, and they have been engaged in R & D which is full of originality.
When we discuss the technology of Japan, we imagine the mass production techiques of Toshiba, Hitachi and so on and understand that their focous is not on original R & D. Therefore, the case of Hamamatsu Photonics is treated an exception.
The difference in techologies between major manufacturers and Hamamatsu Photonics stems from differences in thier markets. We can classify the technologies for TV into (1) receiver tubes (cathode ray tubes) and camera tubes. The latter comprised of three types, camera tubes (2) for television broadcasts, (3) for industrial camera systems (for instance supervisory remote-control systems) and (4) for experiments. (1) (2) and (3) are produced by major manufactures. Hamamatsu Photonics, on the other hand, produces (4). (1) (2) and (3) have large markets, so the strategies of major manufacturers are mass production and resulting cost reductions. They have thus been able to diffuse TV receivers and TV cameras. Moreover, the Japanese goverment which has wanted to develop its electronic industries, has supported these strategies.
Conversely, (4) has just a small market, but researchers pay dearlyfor thier equipment. So, engineers of Hamamatsu Photonics have had freedom for thier own R & D.
There has been a tendency to treat the technology of Japan as mass production technologies, but the force to develop original products in one form or another has also been around.

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