The Japanese Clothing Industry after World War Two and the Emergence of the Gifu Prefecture as a Main Production Centre

Abstract

The Japanese clothing industry developed very quickly after the end of the Second World War. Before the war the industry was predominantly concentrated in the two main industrial cities of Tokyo and Osaka, and, while western-style clothing first became popular after the Russo-Japanese war of 19°4 -05, most clothing purchased in Japan before 1945 was in the traditional kimono style and often hand-made.2 The years immediately following the war saw quite dramatic changes in consumer tastes for clothing. Both Japanese men and women (who were enjoying a hitherto unknown degree of emancipation) began buying American-style garments. This facilitated the rapid development of a mechanised, ready-made clothing industry and a move away from the traditional methods of production. As rapid economic expansion followed, so rising Japanese wages fuelled a boom in domestic consumption of these new style garments.3 Ready-made clothing firms grew quickly in Tokyo and Osaka, tending to focus either on womenswear or menswear, and increasingly responsive to fashion-sensitive demand in these two great consumer centres. Nagoya, Japan's third industrial city and located in between Osaka and Tokyo, had before the war developed as one of the leading textiles producing centres. The long history of textiles production in the Nagoya region had prompted the development of ancillary and related industries, such as the textiles machinery industry (where Sakichi Toyota had managed the family spinning and weaving machinery business before diversifying into motor vehicles in 1936, beginning the Toyota Motor Corporation) and the clothing industry. Nagoya was the third centre of the pre-war clothing industry.4 In the industrial transformation of the 1950S and 1960s the coastal belt, with these three industrial regions of Tokyo, Nagoya and Osaka, changed its appearance from an earlier mixture of heavy and light industries, including textiles and many craft-based industries, to a concentration of heavy industries: steel and shipbuilding in Osaka; chemicals and machinery in Tokyo; and, as the Toyota kingdom grew, transportation equipment in Nagoya.5 The older industries became less important and began to migrate into the agricultural hinterlands. The clothing industry also found that the increasing competition for labour from heavy industries prompted the migration of activity to the hinterlands, even though the value added from the apparel segment of the value chain of the entire fibre industry was relatively high. 6 Gifu, the capital city of Gifu Prefecture, was attracting increasing investments by fibre producers wanting to relocate away from nearby Nagoya already before the war; yet it was not until after the war that any clothing manufacturers were established in the city. Nonetheless, ready-made clothing has become the largest industry in Gifu, with the Gifu