Janet Hunter

The new institutional economics and Third World development

The new institutional economics is one of the the most important new bodies of theory to emerge in economics in recent years. The contributors to this volume address its significance for the developing world. The book is a major contribution to an area of debate still in its formative phase. The book challenges the orthodoxies of development, especially concerning the role of markets. It includes articles from Robert Bates, John Toye and Nobel Laureate Douglass North.

Concise dictionary of modern Japanese history

This is a concise, reliable guide to the people, places, events, and ideas of significance from the Meiji Restoration to the present.

Japanese Government Policy, Business Opinion and the Seoul–Pusan Railway, 1894–1906

Like most research on Japanese involvement in Korea in the latter years of the Meiji period, this article is deeply indebted to the pioneer work of Professor Hilary Conroy. I have also drawn heavily on the work of Eugene and Han-kyo Kim. However, a detailed study of the railways of Korea does not come within the framework of Professor Conroys book, and there is little material on the subject available in English. In Japanese there is the official government history, the Chōsen Tetsudō Shi, but the purpose of this essay is to show the views of the business world on the subject, and so contemporary articles in the leading economic journals have constituted the most important source. A consideration of those articles which comment on the changing state of affairs will perhaps clarify the reasons underlying dōmestic pressure for Japanese involvement in the construction of Korean railways.

National Interest, Reputation, and Economic Development in an ‘Infant’ Country: The Japanese Response to Western Criticisms

Chapter 4 analyses the Japanese response to the criticisms made against Japan. It shows that the majority of Japanese appear to have accepted that the Westerners’ criticisms had a strong basis in fact, and acknowledged that even though the bad behaviour might only characterise a small minority, it could nevertheless be highly damaging to Japan’s international reputation. It was, therefore, in the national interest to address the problem. Measures including the expansion of commercial education, legislative change, and business missions were taken with a view to improving the behaviour of Japanese commercial actors and the country’s reputation. Most Japanese recognised that at least for the time being Japan had to play according to rules dictated by the West, and also subscribed to the assumption that commercial morality would improve as Japan moved towards industrialisation and ‘civilisation’. There was ongoing concern, however, about Japan being considered inferior in this respect to countries such as China.

Deceit, Piracy, and Unfair Competition: Western Perceptions of the Level of Morality in Japan

Chapter 3 considers the discourse on commercial morality as it applied to international transactions, focussing in particular on Western views of Japanese trade and commerce. The criticisms that the Japanese could not be trusted had their origins in the early days of treaty port trade and the personal experiences of Western merchants and diplomatic representatives, but they gained increasing currency from the 1890s when Westerners for the first time became subject to Japanese law. After the turn of the century, criticisms that the Japanese did not adhere to contracts, supplied substandard goods, and engaged in blatant brand and trademark fraud became increasingly widespread. Although the criticisms declined somewhat in the 1920s, the assumptions about Japanese commercial behaviour remained, to re-emerge after the Second World War. Evidence of Japan’s growing success in world trade supports the suggestion that the criticisms were, at least in part, the outcome of a fear of growing Japanese competition.

Credit, Speculation, Legislation, and Reputation: The Evolution of the Discourse on Commercial Morality in England and Beyond

Chapter 2 discusses the emergence in the early nineteenth century of British debates on commercial morality, when the growth of business provoked increasing concerns about fraudulent business practice facilitated by enhanced opportunities for cheating. Apart from moral considerations per se, many argued that cheating might deliver a quick profit, but jeopardised long-term success by endangering repeated transactions and causing reputational risk. Similar debates emerged in the more industrialised economies of Western Europe and North America. Participants in this transnational discourse sought to clarify links between economic prosperity, the growth of credit on which it relied, and the presence or absence of trust and wider ethical practice.

Earthquakes in Japan

This review article examines three monographs that make conspicuous contributions to our understanding of major earthquake disasters in Japan from the mid-nineteenth century through to 2011. They focus on different events and different time periods, and ask different questions, but raise a host of shared issues relating to the on-going importance of disaster in Japans history over the long term. They cause us to consider how seismic disaster is explained, understood, interpreted, and actualized in peoples lives, how the risks are factored in, and how people respond to both immediate crisis and longer term consequences. One recurrent issue in these volumes is the extent to which these large natural disasters have the capacity to change—and actually do change—the ways in which societies organize themselves. In some cases disaster may be perceived as opportunity, but the evidence overwhelmingly suggests that a desire to return to the previous ‘normality’ is a powerful impulse in peoples responses to major natural disasters. The review also argues that the issue of trust lies at the core of both individual and collective responses. A lack of trust may be most conspicuous in attitudes to government and elites, but is also inherent in more everyday personal interactions and market transactions in the immediate aftermath of disaster.

Reviving the Kansai cotton industry: engineering expertise and knowledge sharing in the early Meiji period

Abstract This article analyses the acquisition and application of new cotton spinning technologies in Japan in the early Meiji period, and the ways in which this knowledge helped to mobilise existing resources of human and financial capital. It focusses on the early development of three pioneering firms, the Hirano, Amagasaki and Settsu companies, all of which after 1918 became part of Dainihon Spinning, one of the ‘Big Three’ textile firms of prewar Japan. By looking at the ways in which these companies diffused technical and other expertise, secured finance, and addressed the problems that had confounded earlier initiatives, it shows how technological knowhow from outside the Osaka region was a key factor that enabled the mobilisation of the capital and expertise of business and personal networks in Kansai, and in the process rebuilt the regions traditional predominance in cotton production, laying the foundations for the industrys global competitiveness.

Introduction: Japan’s Consumption History in Comparative Perspective

Over recent decades, we have become ever more familiar with consumer goods that originate in Japan, while the Japanese consumer, dressed in the latest fashion, exercising gourmet taste in food and drink and weighed down by the latest gadgets, has become an accepted part of the image Japan conveys at home and abroad. On the other hand, we are also well aware that Japanese households have demonstrated a phenomenal capacity to save and have appeared reluctant to spend their way out of the recent economic stagnation, suggesting an approach to consumption perhaps different from that typically associated with the spendthrift West. Nonetheless, we are far from familiar with the history that might help to explain the often distinctive features of Japan’s consumption practice. While historians of Europe and North America have been busily discovering the long development path of the consumer, the consumption history of countries beyond the heartlands of Western capitalist industrialisation, such as Japan, has rarely been explored. Indeed, scholars such as Stearns (2001) seem to suggest that these regions have little consumption history of their own.

People and Post Offices: Consumption and Postal Services in Japan from the 1870s to the 1970s

Although the importance of transport infrastructure in the process of industrialisation has long been recognised, ‘for economic historians, postal systems are a neglected topic; many economic history textbooks ignore them altogether’ (John, 2003, p. 315). And yet postal services have long enabled the movement of physical items and money, and played a key role in the transmission of information. In the nineteenth century new state-run systems transformed the scale and speed of postal communication, and other related activities, dramatically widening accessibility across classes and populations. As one observer of the British Post Office remarked in 1938, it was not just a question of running a vast and intricate postal service, a telegraph service, a telephone service and the remittance of money to anywhere in the country and almost anywhere in the world. The Postmaster-General was also ‘a banker with whom one in every four of the population has an account … sells £98 million worth of health and unemployment insurance stamps during the year, pays 220 millions of old age and widows’ and orphans’ pensions, and dispenses licences of many kinds … He is the largest employer of labour in the country and, last but not least, he is a tax gatherer’ (Crutchley, 1938, p. 23). This wide remit was far from atypical (for example, Fuller, 1972, p. 238 for the US).