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The Modernizer as a Special Case: Japanese Factory Legislation, 1882–1911

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 June 2009

R. P. Dore
R. P. Dore
Affiliation:
The London School of Economics and Political Science
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Extract

The ‘modernizer’ is a special species of the genus ‘innovator’ and one which only in the last century has appeared in large numbers on the human scene. There have, to be sure, been groups and individuals at many moments in world history who would qualify under the definition of the modernizer which I propose to use: ‘one who seeks the transformation of his own society or segments of it in imitation of models drawn from another country or countries’. Those Japanese court officials of the seventh century who tried to remould their country on the model of T'ang China are a case in point, and one could probably find many examples on the fringes of the great empires of the past. But it is only in the last century of Western colonialism and rapid technological change that this has become a world-wide phenomenon. It is also only in the last century that the doctrine of human progress has achieved such implicit world-wide acceptance that the imitated models have been seen not simply as ‘superior’ but also as ‘more advanced’—further ahead, that is, in some imputed scale of linear progressive development. The consciousness of backwardness, the concept of underdevelopment, are relatively new.

Type
Research Article
Information
Comparative Studies in Society and History , Volume 11 , Issue 4 , October 1969 , pp. 433 - 450
Copyright
Copyright © Society for the Comparative Study of Society and History 1969

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References

1 As Mary Matossian puts it in an excellent survey of the ways in which the modernizer's dilemma is resolved in explicit ideologies, ‘If the intellectual is to lead the masses of an industrially backward country in the undertaking of great endeavours, he must provide them with incitement balanced by comfort, with self-criticism balanced by self-justification’. ‘Ideologies of Delayed Industrialization’, Economic Development and Cultural Change, 6, iii (04 1958), 218.Google Scholar

2 Minoru, Oka, Kōjōhō-ron (1913), p. 99.Google Scholar

3 Yasoji, Kazahaya, Nihon shakai-seisaku-shi, 4th ed. (1938), p. 135.Google Scholar

4 Minoru, Oka, Kōjōhō-ron, p. 90.Google Scholar

5 General accounts of the history of legislation may be found in Minoru, Oka, Kōjōhō-ron (1913)Google Scholar, Yasoji, Kazahaya, Nihon shakai-seisaku-shi, 4th ed. (1938), Numata Inajiro, ‘Rōdōhō’ in Nobushige, Ukai, et al. , eds. Kōza Nihon kindai-hō hattatsu-shi, Vol. 5 (1958).Google Scholar

6 Nōshōkō Kōtō Kaigi, , Giji sokkiroku, vol. 1, 1961Google Scholar, reprinted in Ritei, Obama, ed., Meiji bunka shiryō sōsho, p. 38.Google Scholar

7 Ibid., p. 50.

8 Minoru, Oka, Kōjōhō-ron, p. 164.Google Scholar

9 Kaigi, Nōshōkō Kōtō, Sokkiroku, p. 46.Google Scholar

10 Nōshōmushō, , Kōmukyoku, Kōjōhō-an yōryō ni taisuru ikensho tekiyō shu (1904).Google Scholar

11 House of Representatives debate, February 5, 1911. Gikai, Teikoku, Gijiroku, p. 4.Google Scholar

12 Kaigi, Daisankai Nōshōkō Kōtō, Giji sokkiroku, reprinted in Obama, op. cit., p. 99.Google Scholar

13 Committee debate of February 16, 1911. Gikai, Teikoku, Gijiroku, p. 184.Google Scholar

14 Kaigi, Nōshōkō Kōtō, Sokkiroku, p. 46.Google Scholar

15 Ibid.

16 Ibid., p. 44.

17 In part using these same debates Marshall, B. K. has recently offered a succinct analysis of the Japanese business ideology, Capitalism and Nationalism in Pre-War Japan (Stanford, 1967).Google Scholar

18 See, for example, the speech of Tanabe Kumaichi in the Diet, , February 5,1911, Gijiroku, p. 5.Google Scholar

19 Nōshōmushō, Kōmukyoku, Kōjō hōan yōryō ni taisuru ikensho tekiyō shū.

20 Kaigi, Daisankai Nōshōkō Kōtō, Sokkiroku, p. 194.Google Scholar

21 Kaigi, Nōshōkō Kōtō, Sokkiroku, p. 53. For those interested in the debate concerning the extent to which the ‘enterprise familism’ of the modern large Japanese corporation is (as Abegglen supposed in his Japanese Factory) simply a carry-over from tradition, or alternatively a relatively recent invention, the debates over factory legislation in 1896 and 1898 provide a good deal of interesting evidence. The introduction of workers‘ official record cards and the imposition of penalties for seducing away the registered employees of other firms (both proposals which fell by the wayside before the bill was enacted) were intended as a means of making the ‘lifelong commitment’ possible and usual. The clearest statement of intentions came from Shimura Gentarō, a former official of the Ministry of Agriculture and Commerce who had been responsible for the 1896 proposals and had subsequently left to become a director of the new Industrial Bank. In the 1898 committee he argued that there was already in the typical Japanese company a greater divorce between ownership and control than was to be found in one-man enterprises of the West. ‘Consequently, they have a tendency to seek not simply the profits of shareholders, but also to be able to seek the profit of the company as a whole. So if we say to these companies: “this is what a manufacturing company ought to be like”—for example, the training of workers should more or less conform to such and such standards—Japan does have compulsory education, but still it is less adequate for workers than it is in Europe, and it’s necessary to give further education—if we set out certain specifications that the manufacturer ought to observe, then since those in charge are not simply and entirely concerned with the shareholders’ profits, but do think of the interests of the company as a whole, or of industry as a whole, we would be likely to get these things carried out.’ He notes that some people are against penalties on the ‘seduction’ of other employers’ labour on the grounds that it interferes with a necessary free market in labour, but ‘the object of this is to try as far as possible to maintain, or as far as possible to establish even in the big factories the family-like relationships which we have at present in Japan, so that we can prevent the kind of antagonism between capitalists and workers which results in such things as strikes’.Google ScholarKaigi, Daisankai Nōshōkō Kōtō, Sokkiroku, p. 106.Google Scholar

22 Ibid., p. 93.

23 ibid., p. 50.

24 Ibid., p. 54.

25 Ibid., p. 56; the speaker was Masuda Kō.

26 Soeda Juichi, ibid., p. 40. Kaigi, Daisankai Nōshōkō Kōtō, Sokkiroku, pp. 92, 93, 100.Google Scholar

27 Kumaichi, Tanabe, debate of February 5, 1911, Gijiroku, p. 5.Google Scholar

28 Kōjōhō-ron, p. 164.

2 Committee debate of February 16, 1911, Gijiroku, p. 7.Google Scholar

30 Kaigi, Nōshōkō Kōtō, Sokkiroku, p. 51.Google Scholar

31 Ibid., p. 55.

32 Ibid., p. 55. There is a piquant element of the argumentum ad hominem in these remarks. Shibusawa had, in these debates, spoken against the factory law proposals.

33 See ibid., pp. 24, 28, 29.

34 It was, though, of early and extreme Ghandiism. See Matossian, Mary, op. cit., p. 224.Google Scholar

35 Kaigi, Nōshōkō Kōtō, Sokkiroku, p. 24.Google Scholar

36 As it has been by Yasoji, Kazahaya, Nihon shakai seisakushi, 4th ed., pp. 138–42.Google Scholar