From Emulation to Innovation: Japanese Toy Exports to High-Income Countries Before World War II

Masayuki Tanimoto ()
Additional contact information
Masayuki Tanimoto: Graduate School of Economics, The University of Tokyo

Chapter Chapter 12 in Imitation, Counterfeiting and the Quality of Goods in Modern Asian History, 2017, pp 225-243 from Springer

Abstract: Abstract This chapter explores how newly introduced “small things” cleared a path to export marketsMarket , specifically markets in Europe and North America from which the products originated. As opposed to the basic “flying geese model”, the toy manufacturing industry in modern Japan depended on the overseas market from an early stage of its development, targeting affluent consumersConsumers in the West. Therefore, it is clear that relatively low wages were not sufficient for Japan to be competitive in the global market, even though toy manufacturing was generally labor-intensive. Without direct transfer of market informationMarket information by Westerners, toy traders in Japan made every effort to acquire useful knowledge concerning new products and accumulated manufacturing as well as design skills. Merchant organizers played key roles to connect market informationMarket information with production, and the potential competition among traders in terms of developing designs and devices contributed to form active responses to the market. Although this competitive situation caused emulation problems, which might have undermined the effort to create brand-new designs and devices, they could be relieved through both formal and informal institutional measures, at least among the domestic traders. This can be recognized as another aspect of the “copy culture”Copy culture in modern Asia.

Keywords: Toy industry; Labor-intensive industrialization; Flying geese model; Emulation; Export-oriented industry; Small workshop (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2017
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

There are no downloads for this item, see the EconPapers FAQ for hints about obtaining it.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:stechp:978-981-10-3752-8_12

Ordering information: This item can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/9789811037528

DOI: 10.1007/978-981-10-3752-8_12

Access Statistics for this chapter

More chapters in Studies in Economic History from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().