“Rattraper et dépasser la suisse”: Histoire de l’industrie horlogère japonaise de 1850 a nos jours by Pierre-Yves Donzé (review)

This is an excellent business history of the clock industry in modern Japan. The late economic historian Hoshimi Uchida’s 1985 Tokei Kogyo no Hattatsu has been a definitive work. Pierre-Yves Donzé’s new book relies on Uchida’s and many other Japanese scholars’ works, but expands the scope of analysis by including the postwar period and the international perspective, especially from the Swiss viewpoint. The title captures the theme of the book. Meaning “overtake the Swiss and pass them,” the phrase was used, to encourage Japanese horologists, by Shoji Hattori, president of Seiko Company in postwar decades.

The discussion begins with the Meiji period, when knowledge of clock-making technology came almost exclusively from Switzerland, and continued thus until recently, when Japanese quartz watches dominated the world market, surpassing Swiss production. The three parts cover the prewar period (1850–1945), the postwar period (1945–85), and the contemporary period (after 1985); the first two parts, each about two hundred pages, form the main story. Throughout, the author either cites or creates 100 useful tables and figures of historic data. In part 1, for instance, a graph in chapter 1 shows the decreasing price of watches measured against the salaries of workers. Whereas 35 days of work were required to buy a Western watch in 1872, this decreased to 5 days in 1904. Another merit of the book is the use of published and unpublished Swiss documents. Around 1900, Japanese makers were regarded by a Swiss observer as incompetent to manufacture clocks. However, in 1920, a confidential report to the Swiss Chamber of Commerce pointed out that Japanese advances in horological production after World War I were remarkable and indisputable, with another expert (misusing his slurs) even referring to the yellow peril in a 1934 essay.

A notable characteristic of the pre–World War II development of the Japanese horological industry covered in part 1 is the geographical concentration of clock manufacturers in Tokyo and Nagoya. Table 17 lists 5 and 17 companies operating, respectively, in these two cities in 1921. Although most companies in Nagoya were small, the largest one, Aichi Clock Manufacturing, hired more than 800 craftsmen, more than the Hattori in Tokyo. Furthermore, it expanded its business before and during the war to manufacture aircraft. After the war, it did not survive as a clock manufacturer, however.

Precise machine tools were crucial to clock and watch production, especially the so-called watchmakers’ lathe. Donzé discusses this technological aspect in the chapter “Technological Stake” in part 2, where he narrates the Ministry of International Trade and Industry’s support for technological transfer; the roles played by university-trained engineers; the technical inferiority of Japanese machine tools, ball bearings in particular; Japanese attempts to copy foreign machines by reverse engineering; and the difficulty, due to legal rules, in introducing horological precision tools from Switzerland. This struggle to catch up with Western clock-making technologies was followed by the introduction of automation in production systems and the production of quartz watches after the 1960s. The successful development and production of the quartz watch enabled Japan to finally overtake Switzerland after 1980.

Part 3 briefly discusses the recent trends in this industry such as the pursuit of new technical products like solar watches and the globalization of production and marketing systems. In the conclusion, the author takes up historiographical issues, such as the adequacy of the “flying-geese” theoretical model to explain the economic and technological progress of Japan and other developing countries. Based on the case study narrated in this book, the author questions the validity of both this theoretical model and the simple generalization of the Japanese case to developments in other countries. He notes the difference between past and present economic and marketing conditions and the distinctness of the Japanese case in the emergence of an entirely...