ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the Japan’s absorption and diffusion of foreign technology. The Japanese chemical industry came into being at the end of the nineteenth century as a diversified collection of small firms using very simple processes. Little progress, economic or technological, occurred until the 1930s, when the military government encouraged the construction of relatively large-scale plants producing basic chemicals for munitions. By the 1930s, the Japanese rayon industry was large enough to support a few firms with their own research and development departments and a large government-sponsored synthetic fibre research association. The Niigata Machine Company began by first producing, in 1900, petrol engines. Its attention was drawn to diesel engines when some of its managers visited the Paris Machinery Exhibition in 1900 and factories in Europe and the United States. The final industry for which Japan’s experience is to be recounted is that of iron and steel.
