著者

斎藤 修

出版者

法政大学

雑誌

経済志林 (ISSN:00229741)

巻号頁・発行日

vol.73, no.4, pp.315-332, 2006-03-03

---

The work culture of prewar Japan's workshop industries (machi-kōba) is characterised by the persistence of traditional attitudes towards craft skills and the workers' high propensity to start a business on their own. This paper explores biographical information about 41 prewar 'inventors' (hatsumeika) of humble origins. They were born in the Meiji period or earlier. As successful men, most of them started their own manufacturing businesses (some of which became big businesses later), but all had only received an elementary education and were supposed to have worked in a workshop industry in the early stages of their career. A close scrutiny of their personal histories reveals, firstly, that formal apprenticeship of a traditional type did not play a significant role whereas factory apprenticeship did. Secondly, there were two groups of workshop worker-inventors: one group came from the countryside, i.e. from farm and/or part-time craftsman households, and the other, from self-employed craftsmen in towns and cities. The typical path to the workshop industry was through factory apprenticeship in the former group while it was training at home in the latter group. Thirdly, the rural-born, factory-apprenticed workers tended to start their own businesses at a substantially younger age than those who were urban-born and home-trained. In terms of numerical importance, moreover, the former outnumbered the latter. In other words, much of prewar Japan's workshop culture must have been of rural origin.