The Global Industrial Now

Despite much talk of a postindustrial world, we are still living in industrial times. The COVID-19 pandemic presents powerful reminders of how dependent our lives and well-being are on industrial production and global supply chains. The majority of consumer products, manufacturing components, and industrial materials used in Europe and the United States are produced on other continents. Many European and North American communities no longer bear visible signs of industrial activity; one can aspire to eat local produce and celebrate local craft culture but cannot opt to consume locally sourced electronics or pharmaceutical products. In Berlin, Amsterdam, New York, Paris, and Baltimore, we take deindustrialization as an established fact and have moved on to contemplating what we see as a postindustrial knowledge economy.¹ But our lives still very much depend on someone else's (very) industrial (and industrializing) economies in cities we would be hard-pressed to name, let alone find on a map. The current global commodity chain crisis notwithstanding, our understanding of the shifting geographies of global industrial production hardly matches our dependence on it. Much work remains to complete the unfinished business of understanding industrialization outside of Europe and North America and take stock of its nature as an ongoing global process.²

At a time when overall industrial activity is increasing, the urgency to update our conceptualization of modern industry along more global lines cannot be overstated. By many indicators, Asia is currently the center of

Coaling ship in Nagasaki, July 7, 1924. Much of the coal necessary to feed the industrial metabolism of Japan was transported using this kind of sailing boats. Most iconic images of Meiji industrialization, including the ones featured on the cover, were staged and arguably aimed at celebrating the kind of production sites which new research has proven to have been of far less consequence than previously thought. In contrast, this non-staged photograph offers a peek into the unfamiliar-looking (and low-tech) working of Japanese industrialization. (Photograph by Benjamin March. Courtesy of Benjamin Marsh Papers, FSA. A1995.10, Freer Gallery of Art and Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, Gift of Judith March David, 1995.)

both the world's economy and its industrial production. According to the World Bank, roughly half of global manufacturing today takes place in Asia. The continent is the home to China and Japan, two of the world's three largest economies. Japan is a unique window into Asian industrial dynamics, as it was the first of the countries on the Asian continent to industrialize before 1900. In the first half of the twentieth century, Japan dominated Asia's financial markets until the collapse of its empire after World War II.³ Today, Japan is at the frontier of high tech, including in artificial intelligence research and supercomputing, a status it shares with China.⁴ To understand the ongoing industrial nature of this moment, we need to keep digging into the history of industrialization processes outside Europe and North America. This special issue offers an empirically grounded intervention into the current understanding of industrialization in modern Japan's history. Its aim is to contribute to a more inclusive, nuanced, and globally informed understanding of how industrialization and industrial activity develop. In so doing, it contributes to drawing attention to neglected aspects of industrial history of Europe and North America.

This special issue offers a constructive challenge to the prevailing historiographical metrics employed when looking at technology outside Europe and its settler colonies. Besides providing a fresh take on Japan's industry between the 1880s and 1970s, this special issue provides new insights into the stories of making and production in our shared human past. By presenting a carefully curated set of studies on industrialization, using history of technology approaches, this issue seeks to establish an agenda for research and analysis along more inclusive lines. As such, it complements recent critiques of the unidirectionality of research on intersections of wealth and technological development in the early modern world.⁵

Provincializing the Post-industrial

As Asia's first industrial power with an exceptional quality of documentary sources, Japan has long been a favorite non-Western reference point in debates on industrialization. Because it already has a certain presence in scholarly conversation, Japan may not seem like a novel point of entry for revisiting the histories of industry in Asia. Yet beneath the surface of familiarity lies a sea of difference, which makes Japan a good place to start working toward a reappraisal of modern industry in Asia. For example, in spite of Japan's prominence in global economic history and debates on global capitalism, from the Great Divergence to Great Acceleration, there is a dearth of historical research about manufacturing in Japan during the long nineteenth century.⁶ This lacuna is all the more glaring given the broad consensus on two substantial points: (1) the relevance of Japan's early industrial landscape for the country's twentieth-century industrial geography, and (2) the particular importance of the 1880–85 period for understanding Japan's industrial rise. These and other particulars reveal that—compared to what we know about industrial transformation in parts of Europe and North America—there remains much to be learned about Japan's industrialization. By way of analogy, imagine all the volumes on a handful of industrialized regions in northern England from the 1760s to the 1840s filling a large library. By contrast, in terms of volume, the works on Japan's entire nineteenth-century industrialization would occupy only one shelf of that library. If much work remains to be done, the sheer quantity of sources on early Japanese industry, both those well-known and those coming to light, offers a potentially rich pool of evidence to be examined with the ever-evolving tools of the discipline of history.

Japan's long-held status as premier, non-Western industrial economy makes it a perfect site for modeling a different kind of industrial history. This is due in part to the fact that Japan's data have often been marshaled to answer questions and feed European and North American historiographical debates. Data on Japan were curated to fit preset interpretive frameworks; questions and points of reference specific to the Japanese experience were often left on the margins of the debate.⁷ As a result, falling through the analytical cracks were processes and concepts that did not resonate with these debates. With a few exceptions, deployed Japanese data did not necessarily bespeak the full scope of the structuring characteristics of the country's early industrial experience.⁸ A new round of research is needed to produce a more capacious history on the industrial experience, one that seeks not to fit Japanese material into ostensibly universal patterns, but rather to allow Japanese material to reveal new questions and concepts, introducing nuance into the conversation and enriching overall disciplinary frameworks. By embodying this approach, the special issue outlines the contours of a global history of industry, focusing the creative energy and efforts by historians of different stripes in order to rework shared disciplinary metrics into a more inclusive and more powerful analytical framework—thereby aiming to improve our overall understanding of the phenomenon of industrialization.⁹

The Trouble with the Cold War "Japanese Model"

Japan's rise to global industrial prominence in the twentieth-century attracted attention because of the resourcefulness and resilience that marked the country's swift development. In 1850, Japan was virtually self-isolating from global trade routes and world markets. Its cottage industries were diverse but limited to internal markets. Japan's social fabric was stressed by a massive protracted famine from 1833 to 1839, which triggered political turmoil. And yet by the end of World War I, a short seven decades later, Tokyo and Osaka had transformed into industrial metropoles, with manufacturing employing around 16 percent of the total labor force. To illustrate the level of industrial activity, Osaka's air pollution indicators rivaled Pittsburgh in the 1910s and 1920s and were higher than those known for London.¹⁰ By the 1930s, in terms of GDP, Japan was punching at 50 percent of France and Germany's weight.¹¹ World War II was a major setback; large portions of Japan's urban centers were reduced to rubble, and the world's first nuclear bombs all but annihilated Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Japan's industrial capacity was not destroyed, but it was significantly enough disturbed that even the most optimistic estimates suggested that recovery would take many decades. Instead, the country rose quickly from the ashes of defeat, seeming to defy all odds. After the war, Japan was occupied from 1945 to 1952, and specific segments of its industrial capacity were initially curbed in order to limit military capabilities. The outbreak of the Korean War in 1950 marked a U-turn in this regard; Japanese industry was effectively boosted by supply contacts for U.S. troops. By the 1970s, Japan's per capita GDP came within the range of industrialized Europe, and its manufacturing had diversified, employing a record 27 percent of the workforce. In addition, Japan was by then in the vanguard of global technology development in sectors like electronics and biomaterials.

Japan's industrial growth after World War II fascinated economists and development aid experts. Cold War dynamics cast a long shadow on the bulk of English-language scholarship on Japan's industrial experience. The narrative that emerged depicted the Japanese experience as an exception to at least two unstated assumptions. The first of these was that Asian societies could only transform and innovate with great difficulty. Japan had proven this assumption wrong by the fact that within five decades of opening up its economy to world markets it had succeeded in establishing internationally competitive manufacturing sectors, an effective army, and a sizable colonial footprint in Asia. The second assumption was that surplus capital was a key precondition for industrialization. Japan proved this wrong by making its first inroads into industrialization without much financial capital; in fact, the Meiji government was chronically short of capital. Whatever capital Japan could raise abroad it surgically micromanaged, while simultaneously pursuing an aggressive strategy of influencing Asian financial markets in the interwar period.¹²

Classic accounts portray Japan's industrialization in terms of models of modern economic growth, thus identifying the basis in the increased productivity in agriculture (industrious revolution) during the early modern period, followed by a successful transition to heavy manufacturing (iron and steel, chemicals, machinery) through technology transfers. According to the narrative, import substitution drove this transfer, and structural changes in the labor market accompanied the process.¹³ During the Cold War, Japan's industrialization had become a valuable example for other industrializing nations, as well as international development and technical aid agencies. The "Japanese model" was particularly potent in the 1970s and 1980s, when the country's high-speed growth (and the U.S. trade deficit) became front-page news. Well into the 1990s, Japan's industrial history continued to be used to teach those on both sides of technical aid programs.¹⁴ In the 1990s, studies that deployed history of technology approaches, such as the now-classic works by Tessa Morris-Suzuki and Morris Low on Japanese industry and technology, entered the debate and worked within existing disciplinary arguments and conceptual frameworks.¹⁵ In the quarter of a century following the publication of these works, their research questions and framing have been revisited, rethought, refined, and in some aspects superseded. New evidence and perspectives portray more fully the rich texture of Japan's early industry and its ramifications for our global industrial present.¹⁶

For Industrialization Look East

The exploration of Japan's industrial transformation in this special issue is driven by a scholarly intuition that, to date, scholarship has missed something in the framing of the research question, largely focused as it has been on economic growth. Few studies have so far employed history of technology approaches to Japan's nineteenth-century industrial transformation.¹⁷ The analytical metrics deployed in scholarship have appeared too blunt to sufficiently address the issues and forces that have, in the eyes of historical actors embedded in those processes, structured the industrialization experience. While this special issue is not the first to suggest that scholarship must look beyond technology-transfer-based development if it is to fully understand Japanese industrialization, it goes beyond this, seeking to forge a new research agenda that may see some of our assumptions turned on their heads.¹⁸ To be clear, the aim here is not to promote Japan's uniqueness or aspire to tell the story of Japan's industrialization "on its own terms." Industrial modernity was not something nations could opt for on their own terms. This special issue models a historiographical approach starting from its own terms and materials to expand overall disciplinary categories and frameworks. The issue's articles tell a story of Japan's industrialization by focusing on technology and simultaneously denaturalizing familiar binaries (such as innovation/imitation) to suggest a different angle for understanding the industrial world.¹⁹ What is at stake here is the development of a convincing new narrative about Japanese industrialization, while contributing insights and material to help us rethink, expand, and build a more inclusive conceptual framework for understanding the ongoing industrial state of the world, including in Europe and the United States. In this way, this special issue suggests ways in which critical perspectives from Asia, the Middle East, Latin America, and Africa can revitalize disciplinary agendas and shake up established paradigms across the board. We consider this a matter of urgency. The climate crisis is upon us, but industry, its main driver, is here to stay. We need to expand the conceptual landscape of our discipline to better understand our collective industrial past and forge, one hopes, a viable and just path out of the crisis.

Individually and collectively, the articles in this special issue nudge us toward new habits of mind when approaching technologies outside Europe and North America. The reorientation called for here—to develop a more capacious analytical framework by including experiences of societies outside Europe and its settler colonies—echoes similar recent calls in the social sciences and humanities.²⁰

Tools for Forging a New Narrative

Together, the articles in this special issue propose four conceptual tools for thinking globally about the history of industrialization, tools to be employed in the reappraisal of current assumptions. The first is embracing the heterogeneous structures of early industrialization. The rapid pace of industrialization has been the dominant trope of much of discussions about Asia. Popular and scholarly work discusses the continent's industrial rise in terms of "miracles," "tigers," and "dragons" that, like Athena from the head of Zeus, leapt out of nowhere.²¹ Yet the historical reality is that in Japan the transformation was long in the making. In academic and popular understandings across the Euro-American world, there is a deeply seated idea that Japan opened its markets in the nineteenth century owing to gunboat pressure and only thereafter, in the 1880s, did its industrialization "take off." However, three generations of Japanese scholarship on technology and labor history have carefully documented a much more nuanced picture: a gradual shift in technical culture starting in the eighteenth century. Japanese economists have shown that what we call rapid industrialization was in fact a swift reorganization of production capabilities that had already been established one or even two centuries earlier. This finding partly explains why Japan did not witness the regionalization of boom and bust that affected industrial zones, such as the Rust Belt in the United States or the Mezzogiorno in Italy. In contrast, the regions in Japan that had developed production capacities in the early modern period were the same regions that industrialized in the early twentieth century. One thing that had changed was the range of products and the scope of the markets.²² Japan was thus engaged in a long process of converting skills and knowledge into capital long before the so-called "takeoff period" that started in the late nineteenth century.²³ We should therefore cast aside our assumptions that speed is the principal hallmark of Japanese industrialization. As noted above, Western observers have paid insufficient attention to changes set in motion prior to the "opening" of Japan, thus leading to the misleading but pervasive unspoken assumption that everything that matters was triggered by the arrival of U.S. gunboats at Tokyo Bay in 1853. One of the reasons that Western observers have missed the long and gradual process of Japanese industrialization was that they fixed their attention on indicators distilled from the European experience. It comes as no surprise, then, that they failed to detect the structuring characteristics of Japanese early industrialization. This fundamental interpretive error has led to a proliferation of misplaced readings of other Asian countries; for India's high-tech industry, the work of Dinesh C. Sharma was needed to set the record straight. His critical analysis of the so-called miracle of the Indian information technology revolution demonstrates that the tech sector was growing in India for several decades before the arrival of U.S. firms seeking low-cost programming and software support labor.²⁴

The second conceptual tool is that of grounded production, which requires keeping in check those habits of mind that assume that foreign presence in any given production situation was a decisive factor of its transformation. For example, imported goods flowing into Japan after the opening of the ports were assumed to have been the reason for the decline of Japanese traditional crafts. While it is true that traditional craft production was displaced in this period, imported goods were not the root cause. In fact, the transformation was due to the reorganization and redeployment of domestic manufacturing capabilities rather than a flood of imports. In the cotton industry, for example, yarn shipments from abroad affected local cotton cultivation to some degree, but more importantly, they stimulated the production of new kinds of cotton cloth in Japanese weaving. This change in manufacturing, not the imports themselves, led to a decline in the rural production of cotton for personal use.²⁵ In short, industrialization did not sound the death knell for traditional crafts. Well into the twentieth century, traditional craft products constituted one-third of all manufactured goods in industrial Japan. Today, they remain one of the most innovative production sectors.

Another example of the benefits of paying close attention to production as a deeply grounded process (as opposed to assuming Western presence was a game changer) can be found upon close inspection of the question of technical advice. In most studies of Meiji industrialization, the presence of foreign engineers and entrepreneurs has often been assumed to be a key variable. In contrast, two essays from this collection highlight areas where the influence of Euro-American actors has been assumed to be more significant than it actually was in a given historical moment. Kobori Satoru's article shows that U.S. technical aid played only a minor role in the development of Japan's steel industry, a finding that runs contrary to the self-assessment of American engineers at the time, who were providing technical guidance under the auspices of the Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers (1945–52). Aleksandra Kobiljski's article demonstrates how coking equipment imported from Belgium failed to work with Japanese coal, requiring massive ingenuity by Japanese technicians to reengineer domestic coals to produce metallurgical-grade coke. These studies highlight what is lost when we assume that advice equals influence and that purchasing equipment equals technology transfer. As often as not, a foreign expert's technical advice given to Japanese entrepreneurs and engineers was politely noted and discretely ignored for various reasons, many of them good ones.

The lopsidedness in assuming that European presence equals influence (which begets scholarly attention) would be a surprise were it not so longstanding and widespread. If the global turn is about denaturalizing the periodization and conceptual toolbox indexed on European historiography, it can also destabilize the conceptual and analytical worlds of specialists of European and North American industrialization. In turn, in the case of Asia, the response of European scholars to the global turn can stimulate valuable empirical work that connects actors and accessible archives in Europe with Asian sites. Frequently, this produces research outputs that zero in on episodes and encounters featuring European actors and assume that the identified encounter was meaningful and exerted an influence on others. Cumulatively, this type of inquiry results in paying outsized attention to what are ultimately microepisodes. The resulting picture, more of a snapshot of European knowledge networks in a global perspective, is misleading as a representation of the diversity of local technical and entrepreneurial culture beyond the Euro-American world. For example, while there is sizable and good scholarship on the role of the Dutch trading outpost in Japan in all manner of scholarly and material exchanges, these studies overdetermine our focus on what on average was only a handful of men trading about two ships a year and living in the functional equivalent of a permanent quarantine on an artificial island in Nagasaki Bay.²⁶ Lost in this picture are entire swaths of landscape that escaped the European grasp. Just next to a handful of European traders, there were hundreds of Chinese merchants who lived in Nagasaki. They ran a far-reaching and resilient regional trade network (including a sizable book and pharmacopeia market); however, they are largely overlooked by the scholarship, despite the scope of the trade networks and the role these merchants played in inter-Asian scholarly and material exchange. In other words, Asian merchant circuits have fallen through the cracks in large part because they did not intersect with Europe-centered trading networks.²⁷ The net result is intense focus on limited segments of networks of knowledge and trade and sizable lacunae on the bulk of Japan's exchanges with the world of Asian trade.

The third tool is analytical coherence in conceptualizing how technology travels. Though widely debunked in the case of early modern Europe, the imitation/innovation binary remains a palpable force in accounts of how technology moves from Europe and North America. It manifests in an unstated but consequential conceptualization of Asian industrial rise as built on imitation, assemblage, and technology transfer. Detailed studies on early modern Europe have demonstrated just how blurred the boundaries between imitation and innovation were when technical knowledge traveled within Europe.²⁸ However, when technology travels across continents, a subtle but remarkable slip of emphasis takes place and story becomes about transfer and appropriation, leaving one with an aftertaste of the view that Asian industrializations—first Japan and now China—build on copying and imitation.²⁹ While low-quality and imitation goods have been a feature of East Asian markets, emphasizing imitation over innovation does not do justice to the creative forces that were fundamental to East Asia's industrial transformation.³⁰ This imitation/innovation binary remains with us, partly through the continued influence of works by David Landes and William McNeill on Europe. Much criticized but not entirely decommissioned, these approaches help maintain Eurocentric framings that dominate influential segments of global history to this day.

The differential appreciation of technical culture in Europe, North America, and other places can lead, inadvertently or not, to major analytical incoherence, which sustains a narrative of the preeminence of Euro-American innovation culture. It does so in part by naming differently the same processes depending on the direction of travel. Specifically, when technology and ideas travel from Europe to Asia, they are labeled "technology transfer," but when they flow in the other direction, from Africa or South Asia into rural United States, the process is called "reverse innovation."³¹ Slips of the pen and mind accumulate over time and play their part in constructing a larger epistemological framework that badly needs a makeover. A good way to start is by setting aside the imitation/innovation binary—and the narratives built on it—as a tacit point of departure.³² Insisting on analytical coherence (and concomitant conceptual integrity) establishes a useful plane for comparative analysis and helps to get us out of the current bind in which we seem to apply different labels to similar technical processes depending on where in the world they take place.

The fourth and final tool is that of microhistories of megaconcepts. This special issue provides elements for reconsidering ideas about the importance of size and scale. While early modernists show that agricultural transformation and technological transformation operate on different historical trajectories, the same cannot be said for how we have viewed the relationship between industrial transformation and economic growth in the modern period.³³ Building on the early modern scholarship that draws on the case of Japan to challenge widely held assumptions about how "modern economic growth" came about, this special issue aims to stimulate a rethinking of the different ways "industry" comes about.³⁴ Take for example the traditional focus on the factory as the emblematic site of industrialization and industry. Meiji-period factories have been the focus of much research and fascination. Today, these types of industrial sites are a large part of the industrial heritage boom. However, behind the facade of Japan fitting neatly into the global industrial imaginary lays an instructive history of difference, which can be revealed through a reconsideration of factory census data. Census data have been used in diverse strands of research on industrial processes, in Japan as elsewhere. However, the very unit of analysis, the factory, is not comparable to Western assumptions of what sites of production qualify as factories. Japanese census data for 1909 and 1919 defined a "factory" as any production structure employing five or more workers. This is a far cry from the emblematic British cotton mills employing fifteen hundred workers and markedly smaller than the typical "small factories," such as Lancashire's woolen mills, averaging thirty-nine workers.³⁵ Even if we accept this modified definition of a factory, we see that only one-third of the labor force in manufacturing worked in one; the remainder worked in production units smaller than an average household. What this means is that it is misleading to uncritically rely on the logic of scale and assume conceptual equivalencies based on our understanding of manufacturing developments in Europe and North America. Japan's industrial trajectories suggest that the size of the production units mattered less than how they networked, though more research is required before we can fully understand how this difference in structure contributed to Japan's industrialization. Heavy industry is another example where Japan defied the logic of scale. While classic studies consider heavy industry the yardstick of industrialization, a corresponding focus on iron and steel in Japan would lead to an imperfect understanding of how industrialization worked there. Despite the symbolic weight that large factories and new industrial sectors had in the Meiji period (1868–1912), most of the production that drove Japanese industrialization was in the "traditional" sectors producing so-called miscellaneous goods. Taken together, matches, hats, footwear, buttons, ceramics, glassware, enamel ironware, straw plaits, fancy mats, umbrellas, brushes, trunks, and toys—artisanal but industrial goods—constituted Japan's second-largest export commodity category in 1930.³⁶

A New Agenda

The five articles in this special issue alter our understanding of how Japan industrialized. The four conceptual tools outlined above suggest at least four questions to keep in mind when thinking about industrial activity along more global lines. First, what was the structure of production decades before a noticeable uptick in industrial development? Second, who were all the actors involved in industrialization, beyond those connected to U.S. and European industrial circuits? Third, what would the story of industrialization look like if we set aside the innovation/imitation binary? Fourth, does size matter? Is bigger indeed better?

This special issue can be read as a story of industrial development woven from five episodes, taking place in two different periods: the first period is commonly referred to as the "takeoff" period from the 1880s to the 1930s; the second is the period of high-speed growth from 1955 to 1975. By bringing together two traditionally segregated historical periods of Japan's industrialization, divided by the Pacific War (1930–45) and the ensuing U.S. occupation (1945–52), this issue intends to highlight systemic features of industrial activity that are common to both periods, including the role that environmental impact plays in the history of industry.

The article by Imaizumi Asuka analyzes the significance of early patenting activities (1885–99) and demonstrates the widely ranging social uses for patenting during the formative years of Japan's modern intellectual property regimes. This work constitutes a de facto empirical counterpoint to Western assumptions that the Japanese were better copiers than innovators, thereby challenging the frameworks that generate those assumptions. Imaizumi's article and David Wittner's original reframing of an ostensibly well-known story of two model factories jointly paint a more balanced group portrait of the Meiji industry actors. These works invite us to rethink who counts in histories of industrialization and what delineates industrial activity.

The articles by Aleksandra Kobiljski and Kobori Satoru address the role of energy in the history of industrial activity in Japan. Kobiljski emphasizes the creative forces that redesigned local energy sources to suit the imported technologies that could not—at first—process Japanese coals. Kobori presents a powerful example of a paradox in energy conservation: strategies for reducing industry's energy consumption could ultimately cause more pollution. While neither article directly aims to issue a critique of technology transfer and adaptation literature, both provide evidence for the limited relevance of the topic for a nuanced understanding of early industrialization in modern Japan.

The articles by Nakamura Shinichiro et al. and Kobori Satoru connect authors who developed environmental history approaches independently, despite sharing an institutional affiliation at the time. Brought together for this special issue, their articles exemplify both a diversity of approaches and the force of the new generation of research on Japan's environmental history of industry and infrastructure engineering.

When taken together, these individual reconsiderations of the particulars of industrialization in Japan suggest an intervention into the history of industrialization as a whole. A more global approach to industry not only promises to foster a better understanding of Asia but also suggests new analytical perspectives on hitherto-neglected traits of Europe's industrial experience. Collaboration and dialogue between history of technology and area studies scholarship are key to writing this new global history of technology. It is easier to call for new frameworks within which this dialogue should occur than it is to actually figure out what those frameworks should be and how to use them; as inspirational and important as Asian historical experiences can be for the general field, they are inaccessible without years of building the necessary language skills, field immersion, and archival access. Consequently, writing a global history of technology is hard to pursue as an individual side interest, second project, or point of comparison without developing collaborations with colleagues who have those skills. It also requires an intellectual commitment to developing what historian Alain Delissen called "patience for the other."³⁷ This kind of patient and multifaceted bridge-building between different communities (and readerships), which was at the heart of curating this special issue of Technology and Culture, is as timely as it was long in the making.