International Circumstances Surrounding the Postwar Japanese Cotton Textile Industry

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The Japanese cotton textile industry, which had been the world's largest exporter of cotton cloth in the prewar period but had lost all the markets during the Second World War, made a rapid recovery during the period from immediately after the war to 1960. This research traced the process of this recovery with the use of both Japanese-language material and the statistics and reports collected by the Cotton Board in Manchester, and attempted to identify international factors contributing to it. The main findings, published in 'International Circumstances surrounding the Postwar Japanese Cotton Textile Industry", are as follows. In the existing literature, attention has been focussed upon the relationships between Japan, the United States and Britain, while this research found the fierce international competition between major Asian exporters, especially Japan, China, Hong Kong and India in the world market as the most powerful force behind the rapid technological innovation and the upgrading of the quality of products by the Japanese industry. Japanese industrial policy, aimed strongly at the upgrading the country's industrial structure and designed to promote industrial restructuring, helped this process, while Hong Kong, by exercising the principle of free trade advocated by the GATT most literally, made a vital contribution towards the intensification of intra-Asian competition in the international market. A deeper cause for the intensity of this competition, however, came from the relatively swift trend of import-substitution industrialisation in other developing countries in Asia and Africa, which forced the major Asian exporters to compete with one another on a global scale, including the advanced Western markets which tended towards protectionist.A sequence to the above, titled 'East Asia in World Textile Trade, 1960-1980, has been read at a conference in Taiwan in November 1998, which is currently being revised for publication.