Paper short abstract:

During the early 20th century the competitiveness of Japan's cotton industry increased rapidly, posing a growing threat to the international dominance of British cotton producers. This paper will look at British assessments of Japan's cotton entrepreneurship and management in this period.

Paper long abstract:

During the first half of the 20th century the competitiveness of Japan's cotton industry increased rapidly, posing a growing threat to the international dominance of British cotton producers. Excellence in management and entrepreneurship is widely believed to have been one of the keys to this growth, and recent research on Britain's Lancashire and Japan's Kansai region has suggested that in the late 19th-early 20th century Japan's business culture differed from that of Britain in certain key respects. These differences included ideas regarding the social role of business, attitudes towards technology, the central role of the corporation and its founding household, and the close links between industry and commerce. Some of these same differences had been suggested some 70 years earlier by Arno S. Pearse, who produced for the Manchester-based International Federation of Master Cotton Spinners and Manufacturers Associations an extensive report on the cotton industries of Japan and China, published in 1930. Pearse argued that Japan's success in cotton production was due in particular to the existence of a group spirit that subordinated personal to national interests, the good use of wartime profits, and efficient and rational organisation. This paper will look in more depth at British assessments of Japan's cotton industry in the early decades of the 20th century, relating these assessments to the historical evidence on management and entrepreneurship in Japan's cotton producing firms.