The Coordinated Rise of the Japanese Steel Industry

Abstract

To begin the historical study, this chapter considers the factor that called forth the development of resource networks in the Asia-Pacific region — the post-war rise of the Japanese steel industry. In the early 1950s, the Japanese government launched a heavy industrialisation strategy that aimed to build a modern, internationally competitive steel sector to act as a core industry for its economic development programme. Owing to Japan’s almost complete lack of mineral resources, its rapidly growing steel industry was forced to import iron ore and metallurgical coal from suppliers in the Asia-Pacific, providing an early impetus to resource production networking in the region. However, the distinctive characteristics of the resource networks formed by the Japanese steel industry owe as much to features of the post-war Japanese political economy as its paucity of raw materials. Industrial coordination, achieved through institutionalised patterns of firm-firm and state-firm cooperation, was a critical factor that both facilitated high-speed growth in Japan’s steel industry, and shaped the characteristics of resource networks the industry would develop to secure its supply of minerals from overseas sources.