Session 4: Individual Papers: Capital and Labor in East and Southeast Asia

Organizer: Paula Richman, Oberlin College

The "Resegmentation" of the Japanese Labor Market during the Lost Decade

Sebastien Lechevalier, Ecole des Hautes Etudes

This paper proposes an interpretation of the current transformation of the Japanese employment system.

In a first part, we criticize the way this question is asked. Indeed, both most common views—the end vs. the stability of the Japanese employment system—are characterized by an underlying conception of the Japanese employment system as homogeneous. Depending on the level of the study—the level of the individual firms (micro) or the one of the whole labor market (macro)—these perspectives will lead to antagonistic conclusions—drastic changes in the first case, stability in the second case. However, the Japanese employment system is fundamentally heterogeneous at the level of the firms. This refers to the famous "dual structure of the labor market" (firm heterogeneity according to the size).

In a second part, we will show that this "dual structure" has notably changed since the 1950s, almost vanishing from the 1960s to the 1980s. Then, based on the case study of the electrical machinery sector, this part states an increasing and new form of heterogeneity in terms of employment policies and performances among firms belonging to the same sector and, of equivalent size, since the beginning of the 1990s. This is the main current transformation of the Japanese labor market.

In a final part, we try to link this new form of firm heterogeneity to the trend towards increasing inequalities in Japan, topics which have become very popular in Japan recently. We mobilize the "segmented labor market" theories to propose an interpretation of this trend as a "resegmentation" of the Japanese labor market.

A. A. Vantine and Company: Japanese Handcrafts for the American Consumer, 1895–1920

Yumiko Yamamori, Bard College

My paper will explore the activities of American trading companies in Japan’s former treaty ports in the early twentieth century. These entities as well as the timeframe have never been a focus of scholarship devoted to Japanese art and culture. American merchants played an important role in shaping popular taste of Japanese handcrafts. In tandem with the evolution of mass marketing, the fashion for things Japanese further penetrated American society, from the upper-middle class to the middle and the lower-middle classes, from urbanites to the rural population. With this move, elaborate handcrafts that had attracted rich patrons in the nineteenth century gradually yielded to affordable bric-a-brac, much of it provided by A. A. Vantine. This leading Asian store in New York will serve as a case study in the complex intermingling of taste, trade, and socioeconomic developments that took place in Japan and the United States. The timeframe corresponds to the period in which Vantine operated branches in Yokohama and other cities, and aggressively promoted diverse Japanese handcrafts to the American consumer through their retail stores and mail-order catalogues. The end period, approximately 1920, witnessed not only the fading of the popularity of Japanese art and design in America, but also the dissemination of artifacts mass produced in Japan, for example, inexpensive dinner sets by Nippon Tōki (today’s Noritake). These developments represent the end of the era of "Meiji" design (1868–1912), in which exoticism played an essential role. Vantine’s activities will be thus contrasted with those of Nippon Tōki.

Taiwanese Capital on the Mainland: Globalization and Its Domestic Consequences in Taiwan

Pei-Shan Lee, National Chung Cheng University

This paper attempts to address one of the most severe challenges facing Taiwan in the past decade: the massive investment of Taiwanese capital in mainland China and its consequences for domestic political economy. This phenomenon is particularly intriguing since it has happened in a context in which two political rivalries, so far refusing to undertake serious peace-making dialogue, have been intertwined in the broader chain of globalization. The massive capital export has not only given rise to the so-called "industrial hollowing out," it has fundamentally triggered the restructuring of Taiwanese state capitalism via changes in government-business relations, thus prompting the reconfiguration of coalition politics and economic policy-making. The globalization debates in Taiwan have boiled down to some thorny problems: how the disintegration of state capitalism copes with the increasing economic integration with China and how contrasting political and economic logics find the equilibrium of reconciliation.

The Formation and Transformation of Neo-Traditionalism in Taiwan

Ming-sho Ho, New York University

Since Andrew Walder’s classic study on China, neo-traditionalism has been the key to understanding the industrial relationship in communist society. Briefly, neo-traditionalism refers to a particular labor regime in which workers are highly dependent on firms, rewards are redistributed according to political loyalty, and authority is extended to every aspect of daily life. While recent scholarship has been focused on the transformation dynamic of neo-traditionalism in post-reform China, less noticed is that a similar process took place in capitalist Taiwan.

This paper deals with the rise and fall of neo-traditionalism in Taiwan. After the military setback on the mainland, the Koumintang (KMT) retreated to Taiwan and confiscated all the industrial, estates left by the Japanese. With the dire need to accommodate mainland refugees and to consolidate its control over civil society, the KMT built up a vast empire of corrupt factory clientelism in the state-owned enterprises. Compared with the Chinese variant, the neo-traditionalism in Taiwan is marked by: (1) ethnic inequality in the division of labor; (2) less isolation from the private sector; and (3) more vulnerability to political upheaval. Thus, in the late 1980s, as the democratic movement led by the Taiwanese opposition politicians was on the rise, workers also staged a protest from below. In many state-owned enterprises, workers succeeded in winning control of the union and dismantling the KMT machines in the factory. By the mid-1990s, neo-traditionalist control was mostly gone, and the industrial relationship showed a market-oriented turn as the government began to implement the privatization policy.

This paper is based on an in-depth case study on the Kaoshiung Refinery of the China Petroleum Company (CPC). Most data were collected in a two-year period of ethnographic study.

The Political Economy of Banking Supervision in Indonesia, Korea, and Thailand

Sawa Omori, University of Pittsburgh

What makes the pace and the degree of financial reforms vary in Asian countries? Does a country commit to financial reforms as a response to international pressures by the International Monetary Fund (IMF)? Or is the reform a response to interest groups? Or rather, is it that political institutions have institutional characteristics to facilitate financial reforms? This paper seeks to answer these questions by examining reforms of banking supervision over the banking sector in Indonesia, Korea, and Thailand by comparing the pre- and post-Asian financial crisis.

Establishing effective prudential banking supervision over the banking sector is a critical area more than ever after the Asian financial crisis, given the magnitude of the banking crisis and the emphasis of the IMF in its conditionality programs. Nevertheless, in spite of the emphasis on strengthening banking supervisory agencies by the IMF in its conditionality programs after the Asian financial crisis in all three countries, the pace of enhancing banking supervision varies throughout these three countries.

I argue that the number of political parties within the executive branch, and both the preferences and the degree of concentration of the banking sector, would explain the pace of enhancing banking supervision. I will closely examine how the interactions between the IMF, the officials of the Central Banks and the banking restructuring agencies, political parties within executive coalitions, and the banking sector shape the timing, degree, and pace of reforms of banking supervision in Indonesia, Korea, and Thailand.