| NOTA |
(★)(This dramatic book investigates one of the great success stories of the twentieth century : the rise of the Japanese electronics industry. Contrary to the established view, Simon Partner finds that behind the meteoric rise of Sony, Matsushita, Toshiba, and other electrical goods companies was neither the iron hand of MITI nor a government-sponsored export-led growth policy, but rather an explosion of domestic consumer demand beginning in the mid-1950s. The consumer boom in Japan was a mirror of the golden age getting under way in the United States, but the reflection was a deeply distorted one : in Japan, companies had to create demand for television sets, washing machines, and refrigerators amidst conditions of widespread poverty and unmet needs. After a discussion of the prewar and wartime background, Partner turns to the business leaders, engineers, assembly-line workers, and ordinary citizens who participated in the creation of a market for these new and expensive objects of desire. Here we learn of the American anti-Communist drive to launch television in Japan ; of the massive, U.S.-sanctioned import of product and marketing technologies ; of the recruitment of young female workers to apply their ´nimble fingers´ on the assembly lines ; and of the development of Japan´s first export success, the transistor radio. Partner compellingly relates these pressure-cooker years in Japan to such key themes of twentieth-century experience worldwide as the role of technology in promoting social change, the rise of mass consumer societies, and the construction of gender in advanced industrial economies. ◆Simon Partner is Assistant Professor of History, Duke University, and the author of ´Saying Yes to Japanese Investment (1992)´.) |
BASE de DATOS, Biblioteca del Centro Cultural de la Embajada de Japon
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