Economic History of Japan: 1600-1900: Economic History of Japan 1914-1955

This multi-volume series covers the whole of modern Japanese economic history. The series encompasses both the institutional aspects of Japanese economic development, and the results of econometric and cliometric research to place the key moments of Japanese economic history in a more general context. Volume three, A Dual Structure, covers the first half of the twentieth century when Japan's economic modernization brought the country into the circle of world powers between the two world wars; the economic system established in the Second World War transformed the economy; and postwar reconstruction provided the foundations for an extraordinary economic dynamism. Where appropriate the book looks back to the nineteenth century and forward to the 1960s. Thematic in its approach, A Dual Structure explores how it was that during a prolonged period of hardship for the world economy, particularly during the deflation of the 1920s and the worldwide depression in the early 1930s, Japan's economy managed to overcome these crises and turbulence, before entering into a period of remarkable high-speed economic growth. Issues examined in particular include the development and transformation of Japan's financial system and monetary policy, the emergence of big business as an economic power, the Japanese empire and its colonies, wartime controls, and the economic democratization, reconstruction, and high-speed growth that followed. At the centre of this study is a consideration of the 'dual structure' of the Japanese economy which emerges in this inter-war period, of small-scale companies on the one hand, large industrial firms on the other, and the increasing flow of labor into the cities which resulted. Written by leading Japanese scholars, and available for the first time in English-translation, the contributions have been abridged and re-written for a non-Japanese readership.