Upgrading traditional industries in interwar Japan: from cotton tabi to Bridgestone tyres

This paper contributes to our understanding of how Japan became the only Asian country to achieve sustained catch-up industrialisation before WWII. It does so by analysing the absorption of useful foreign knowledge in a traditional Japanese textile town and its subsequent evolution into a modern rubber manufacturing cluster. The cluster analysed is Kurume in Fukuoka Prefecture which began the interwar period as a major producer of cotton tabi (split-toed footwear). The core argument is that Kurume firms Nihon Tabi and Tsuchiya Tabi built on their foundations as large sewing factories by ‘borrowing capacity’ from general trading companies. This enabled them to evolve into large-scale rubber-soled footwear manufacturers capable of absorbing high-level engineering knowledge necessary to compete with Dunlop and US tyremakers in Asian motor tyre markets. A rich body of new primary material ranging from the corporate archives of Mitsui Bussan and Mitsubishi Shōji to regional industrial surveys is analysed using a novel conceptual framework. This framework draws upon Klepper’s (2010) heritage theory which suggests that best-practice industry knowledge is diffused out of leading firms. Integrated into this approach is Abe & Nakamura’s (2010) suggestion that the ‘indigenous industrialization process’ in Japan identified by Tanimoto (2006) was not separate from, but interacted with, the diffusion of Western-style manufacturing.