Technology and Investment : : The Prewar Japanese Chemical Industry / / Barbara Molony.

• Superior document: Harvard East Asian Monographs ; 145
• VerfasserIn: Molony, Barbara,
• TeilnehmendeR: Molony, Barbara.; Uno, Kathleen S., 1951-
• Place / Publishing House: Boston : : Harvard University Asia Center,, 1990.; Leiden; , Boston : : BRILL,, 1990.
• Year of Publication: 1990
• Edition: 1st ed.
• Language: English
• Series: Harvard East Asian Monographs ; 145.
• Physical Description: 1 online resource.

The chemical industry was Japan's first "high-tech" industry, and its companies the most important examples of a noteworthy business structure in the prewar period, the so-called "new zaibatsu." Molony deals with one branch of the chemical industry--electrochemicals--with shorter descriptions of related branches. At the hear of the book is the story of Noguchi Jun, founder of Japan Nitrogenous Fertilizers (Nippon Chisso Hiryō) and one of Japan's best known twentieth-century entrepreneurs. Noguchi's firm developed from a fertilizer company to a multifaceted company producing a wide range of technologically sophisticated products while he forged ties with civilian and military leaders in Japan and Korea who controlled access to capital and to the hydroelectricity needed for chemical manufacture. The book also treats the second and third waves of investment and electrochemicals during the 1920s and 1930s. This study analyzes the nature of prewar Japanese entrepreneurship, the links between technology and investment, the emergence of a class of scientific managers, and the relationship of business strategy to imperialism in the years leading up to World War II.

Table of Contents

Made in Japan: Meiji women's education / Martha Tocco -- Thoughts on the early Meiji gentleman / Donald Roden -- Commodifying and engendering morality: self-cultivation and the construction of the "ideal woman" in 1920s mass women's magazines / Barbara Sato -- "S" is for sister: schoolgirl intimacy and "same sex love" in early twentieth century Japan / Gregory M. Pflugfelder -- Seeds and (nest) eggs of empire: sexology manuals--manual sexology / Mark Driscoll -- Engendering eugenics: feminists and marriage restriction legislation in the 1920s / Sumiko Otsubo -- Making "soldiers": the Imperial Army and the Japanese man in Meiji society and state / Theodore F. Cook, Jr. -- Reading the Japanese colonial archive: gender and bourgeois civility in Korea and Manchuria before 1932 / Barbara J. Brooks -- Women's deaths as weapons of war in Japan's "final battle" / Haruko Taya Cook -- Gendering the labor market: evidence from the interwar textile industry / Janet Hunter -- Sorting coal and pickling cabbage: Korean women in the Japanese mining industry / W. Donald Smith -- Managing the Japanese household: the New Life movement in postwar Japan / Andrew Gordon -- The quest for women's rights in turn-of-the-century Japan / Barbara Molony -- Womanhood, war, and empire: transmutations of "good wife, wise mother" before 1931 / Kathleen Uno -- Toward a critique of transhistorical femininity / Ayako Kano -- Feminism and the media in the late twentieth century: reading the limits of a politics of transgression / Setsu Shigematsu.