著者

伊田 吉春

出版者

Business History Society of Japan

雑誌

経営史学 (ISSN:03869113)

巻号頁・発行日

vol.48, no.1, pp.1_26-1_50, 2013 (Released:2016-03-18)

参考文献数

60

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The goal of this paper is to show the role technologies used in silk manufacturing played in the development of high quality silk production.In 1878, Kichiroji Tase and his family began producing raw silk through mechanical means in order to improve quality, but the early stages involved a great amount of trial and error, and they were unable to produce silk of very high quality at first.However, the Tase family continued working into the 1890s, aiming to increase production gradually, and eventually were able to produce high-quality raw silk. This improvement in quality was due to a number of factors which included improving the silk production equipment, carefully selecting the cocoons used as raw material, and mastering the processes involved in boiling and reeling the silk. At this stage however, the “sunk reeling” process which required separate boiling and reeling steps had not yet been brought into full use, so while quality had increased, production could not yet be expanded.The “sunk reeling” process was fully established as a part of production after the dissolution of the silk manufacturing association in the 1900s, and efficiency increased. The family had created a system enabling large-scale production of high-quality raw silk, and they were able to further tighten factory management policies in the hopes of increasing operational efficiency. It was at this point that operational differences between the Tase family’s silk company and the Suwa silk industry essentially disappeared. After developing their own raw silk production methods, the Tase family had to begin competing with the large-scale silk producers in the market for high-quality silks, and during this period the Tase family increased production of silk thread for textiles and opened a branch factory in order to expand their operations.