Assembled in Japan: Electrical Goods and the Making of the Japanese Consumer (review)

Assembled in Japan: Electrical Goods and the Making of the Japanese Consumer. By Simon Partner. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999. Pp. xiv+303. $55/$19.95.

During the 1960s and 1970s, as manufacturing technology in Japanese industry improved, Japanese electrical and electronics products attained commercial success in world markets. Simon Partner focuses not the 1960s and 1970s, but on the decade previous, and his concern is the lifestyle of the Japanese people, which changed drastically after World War II and provided, he maintains, the basis for the growth of the Japanese electrical and electronics industry.

Partner stresses two factors in this growth: marketing strategies and cheap labor. He argues that the phenomenon of high growth in postwar Japan had its antecedents in the prewar and wartime eras. During the years of Allied occupation (1945-52), Japanese business leaders developed their vision of a Japanese consumer society by searching consciously for the keys to the prosperity of the United States. The first of these was the power and influence of the media, particularly television, and Partner describes the beginning of television broadcasting in Japan. The second key was the importation of technology. Partner observes that Japanese companies had to develop not only new products but also markets for those products, and toward that end they imported a wide range of production, management, and marketing techniques. (Thus Partner's concept of "technology" includes both management and marketing techniques.) The cultivation of a domestic market was crucial to Japanese postwar industrial development. Japanese business leaders set out to emulate an American-style, middle-class society, with its vital emphasis on the consumer, despite the poverty that continued to haunt Japan in the years following the war.

Finally, Partner focuses on the important ingredient of cheap labor provided by young Japanese women--a key to Japanese prosperity, he argues, that "increasingly has been forgotten in the recent celebration of Japanese technological prowess" (pp. 4-5).

Not many studies have covered this ground, even in Japanese, so one would expect this to be a valuable book. It will certainly be of interest to non-Japanese readers, since it deals with the history of an important industry about which not much information is yet available in English, and Partner is a vivid writer. It is frustrating, however, that he relies so heavily on secondary sources and deals with them so uncritically. Moreover, numerous minor mistakes and misunderstandings combine to render his interpretations somewhat suspect. Together, these problems undermine the scholarly quality of the book.

Yuzo Takahashi

Dr. Takahashi is professor of electrical engineering at Tokyo University of Agriculture and Technology.

Permission to reprint a review published here may be obtained only from the reviewer.

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