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Abstract
The superior competitiveness of the Japanese cotton industry became so obvious in the interwar period. The sources of the Japanese competitive advantage have thus collected considerable scholarly interest. A series of past studies stressed the significance of planned coordination and managerial innovations within the industry as a whole, and this involved their findings that the leading spinners and trading companies realised the efficient coordination. This paper inquires into the Meiji industrial leaders' conceptualisation of the new nature of entrepreneurial management. This entails an analysis of their early entrepreneurial leadership in the 1880s that provided the developing industry with a long-range plan for exponential growth since then. The essence of industrial competitiveness resided in the noticeable cognitive commonality in their sustainable core competence for the upcoming global competition.
Notes
1. Manchester Chamber of Commerce Monthly Record, Vol. 36, pp. 176–177.
2. See the section on the Japanese cotton industry: Pearse, 1929, pp. 25–29, 34, 38–42, 76–86.
3. The Board of Trade in 1928 conducted a series of research projects on the Japanese cotton industry of the second half of the 1920s. See Board of Trade (Citation1928). Then, as the international competition got fiercer from the beginning of the 1930s, the Foreign Office also got involved with the research on the Japanese industry in 1933 and 1934. See Foreign Office (Citation1933, Citation1934).
4. Institute of Innovation Research, Hitotsubashi University (Tokyo, Japan) and Japan Business History Institute (Tokyo) archive the largest collections of Japanese company history.
5. See Yamanobe (Citation1887), from 30 April to 25 September 1887; especially, his record in Britain from 19 June to 23 September 1887 presents Watanabe's close company.
6. See Yamanobe (Citation1879); especially from September 1879 to April 1880.
7. Rengō Bōseki Geppō [The monthly journal of the Cotton Spinners' Association; May 1889 – June 1891 from number one to number six]. Osaka: The Cotton Spinners' Association.
8. All quotations from the nineteenth-century articles by Yamanobe and Watanabe were translated by Eugene K. Choi.
9. See Platt-Saco-Lowell DDPSL 1/78/23-25 (Foreign no. 8–10; November 1892–May 1897), The Lancashire Record Office, Preston, United Kingdom.
10. This article includes an appendix presenting a detailed accounting case of a mill in Bolton (in 1887). The translation from the English language to the Japanese was done by Yamanobe himself.
11. Rengō Bōseki Geppō, No. 6, October 1889, pp. 1–2. See Yamanobe's introductory argument on the ‘Difficulty of the Cotton-Spinning Industry’.
12. The research works of Kennedy and Kulke provide the remarkable significance of Parsee (Parsi) entrepreneurs in the industrialisation of India. See Kennedy (Citation1962) and Kulke (Citation1974).
13. Japanese business historians have recently made a significance achievement in the field of comparative historical analysis of industrial competitiveness (see Yuzawa, Suzuki, Kikkawa, & Sasaki, 2009).