WINNERS AND^481tastemaker and style leader, mass producer of vessels of freedom and
love.*
The number of registered motor vehicles in Japan in 1917 was
3,856; in 1923, the number had risen only to 13,000, all imported.
The big movers were still rickshaws and horse-drawn carriages and
wagons, plus trams, and trains for long-distance travel.^1 ' But the war,
as everywhere, sharpened the sense of need and opportunity. The
military had learned to value trucks and now moved to develop a
home manufacture. They spoke to the leading zaibatsu
(conglomerates)—Mitsui, Mitsubishi, Sumitomo—and found them
singularly uninterested. So they recruited lesser players, and the
Japanese automobile industry came largely into the hands of "new
men."
Entering a fallow but fertile field, Ford and General Motors built
auto assembly plants in Yokohama (1925) and Osaka (1927). The
Japanese came to see these not as an advantage to their consumers
but as a deterrent to the development of their own industry, still
unfamiliar with mass-production technology. Low as were wages, a
Japanese-made vehicle cost 50 percent more than an American-
assembled car or import. Between 1926 and 1935, these last
accounted for more than 95 percent of new vehicle registrations.^15
Meanwhile the state, with aggression aforethought, had focused
on manufacture for military use: hence the Military Automobiles
Assistance Law of 1918, which offered large subsidies for utilitarian
vehicles that met specified standards.** Passenger cars could wait.
- The assembly-line principle was adaptable to various methods of manufacture.
Henry Ford stressed long runs and stuck to technologies long after they were obso-
lete. When he was right, he was very, very right. And when he was wrong, other pro-
ducers took market share. Flink, "Unplanned Obsolescence," states that the Model T
was in some respects obsolete from the start. But it was cheap, the price of the stan-
dard model going from $825 in 1908 to $260 in 1927. That was the end: in May
1927, the last of over 15 million Model T's rolled off the line.
ï It is easy to underestimate the contribution of the rickshaw, but it was the key ve-
hicle of urban Japan: some 38,000 in Tokyo alone in 1888. Morris-Suzuki, Techno-
logical Transformation, p. 97, argues that "the rikisha was just as important to Japan's
modern economic development as the railway." She goes on to stress two aspects: it
was the first Japanese vehicle to be exported, opening markets that would later take bi-
cycles and motor vehicles; and it was made by networks of small suppliers of compo-
nents, thereby anticipating the structures of the automobile and other assembly
industries.
- Since Japan at this point had no enemies in prospect, one must see these measures
as an anticipation of imperial expansion. On the law of 1918, see Morris-Suzuki, Tech-
nological Transformation, p. 124.
- Since Japan at this point had no enemies in prospect, one must see these measures