ABSTRACT
This chapter explains case study of the shipbuilding industry that illustrates companies found it necessary to set up their own training facilities and focuses on the mastery of new production techniques if they were to survive and succeed. It examines what people know of how and why Japan, uniquely outside the West in the pre-war period, was able to create the technological basis that made it, by the time of Japan's commitment to war in Asia and the Pacific, an industrial power to be reckoned with. Big businesses battled to master the capital-intensive techniques of large-scale production, the scope for the development of 'appropriate', labour- and skill-intensive methods proved much greater in the small-scale, 'traditional' sector. Japanese institutions made perhaps their most distinctive contribution to the technological transformation underlying industrialisation. The chapter describes advances were made in the traditional technology that enabled it to continue to dominate the domestic market which steadily increased through the 1870s and 1880s.
