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Pierre-Yves Donzé & Maki Umemura, "Pierre-Yves Donzé & Maki Umemura, Japan and the Great Divergence in Business History" (JESB, 2025)
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- [00:00]
Maki Umemura
Hello, everybody.
- [00:01]
Marshall Po
This is Marshall Po. I'm the founder and editor of the New Books Network. And if you're listening to this, you know that the NBN is the largest academic podcast network in the world. We reach a worldwide audience of 2 million people. You may have a podcast or you may be thinking about starting a podcast. As you probably know, there are challenges basically of two kinds. One is technical. There are things you have to know in order to get your podcast produced and distributed. And the second is, and this is the biggest problem, you need to get an audience. Building an audience in podcasting is the hardest thing to do today. With this in mind, we at the NBM have started a service called NBN Productions. What we do is help you create a podcast, produce your podcast, distribute your podcast, and we host your podcast. Most importantly, what we do is we distribute your podcast to the NBN audience. We've done this many times with many academic podcasts and we would like to help you. If you would be interested in talking to us about how we can help you with your podcast, please contact us. Just go to the front page of the New Books Network and you will see a link to NBN Productions. Click that, fill out the form and we can talk. Welcome to the New Books Network.
- [01:07]
Paula de la Cruz Fernandez
Hello and welcome to the New Books Network Economic and Business History Channel. My name is Paula de la Cruz Fernandez and I am host of the channel. I'm also host and co editor of the New Books Network en Espanol. Today I meet Pierre Yves Doncet from Osaka University and Maki Umemura from Cardiff University. They are the guest editors of the latest volume in the Journal of Evolutionary Studies in Business, Volume 10, Issue Number 2 on Japanese Business history. Hello.
- [01:46]
Pierre Yves Doncet
Hello, Porter. Thanks a lot for today.
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Maki Umemura
Hello. Thank you for having us.
- [01:51]
Paula de la Cruz Fernandez
There are other several interviews with contributors to the journal on the NBN and on the NBN en Espanol, so don't hesitate to look at those as well. So first I'd like for the guest editors to tell us a little bit more about you and how you got to the idea of gathering the contributors and the topics for this special issue. Especially like, what did you want to accomplish with it? But first, please tell us a little bit more about you.
- [02:28]
Maki Umemura
Pierre, do you want to start?
- [02:30]
Pierre Yves Doncet
Yes, maybe because I invited you after the project. But actually I was an associate editor for this journal, jesb, since the beginning. And before I stop, after a few years, Paruma Fernandez asked me to do something about Japan. She asked what is going on with new generations of Japanese scholars. Because we don't see so many of them anymore in conferences. But I'm sure there's something to say to a global audience. I'm sure some people are innovative and I want to do more so do something about that. So it's a starting point and so I thought it's not just obey, but I thought it was a great idea because I'm based in Japan and I know that many young scholars should have a better attraction from a global audience because what they do is interesting. And so I wanted to do that, but I didn't want to do that at all. I wanted to be with a co editor to be able to do it properly. A co editor who is a business historian worked with a strong encourage in management studies to be able to communicate between both fields. And this is why I asked the Maki Umemura to. And so we were by the way at HBS together two years ago and so it was very good to share the SEMO fields to prepare. These are this issue.
- [04:03]
Maki Umemura
Yes. So I have very little to my contribution compared to PRVRE's like organization and idea. And I think that I was very delighted to come to the special issue and be invited and kind of look and help to kind of put together the special issue. But it was very much led, I would have to say by Claire Eve.
- [04:33]
Pierre Yves Doncet
I think it was a teamwork. And.
- [04:37]
Paula de la Cruz Fernandez
So could you kind of explain what are these new perspectives, these evolutionary perspectives? Where are the new perspectives coming from Japan?
- [04:49]
Maki Umemura
Yeah.
- [04:49]
Pierre Yves Doncet
To start, I think the situation of business history in Japan does not follow so much the global trend or the trend you can see in Anglo Saxon countries. Japan used to be at the top frontier of business history research in the 90s, early 2000s and then it started to decline, the presence started to decline. Except a few persons, of course. There are still Japanese people who submit to international journals who are in international conferences but are less engaged than previously. So we could imagine that builder's history had disappeared in Japan, which is not the case. So I think it was worth explaining what we do in the introduction to explain the evolution of business history as a field in the plan before going to the chapters we present that are somehow exceptions to the general trends. But these exceptions are I think important to be looked at.
- [05:56]
Maki Umemura
Yeah, I think that what we. I've been a business historian of Japan for quite a long time now and one of the things that I've noticed over time is that there are fewer Japanese presenters in international conferences in more recent years and also that people are much less interested in in Japan, particularly if you are in the uk Because Japan is not the kind of economic or business juggernaut that it had been a few decades ago. So I think that what we wanted to kind of showcase through the special issue was how not only have different types of Japanese business history, both as a subject and thematic area, but kind of a new generation of Japanese scholars who are using kind of more interdisciplinary approaches to the study of Japanese business. Because when you go to Japan and attend some of the Japanese business history workshop, a lot of the kind of old guard have tended to be highly, highly descriptive and kind of single case studies of companies. But what we wanted to show is that these are kind of new ways in which a young generation of scholars are looking at things. So that's, I think what the.
- [07:18]
Paula de la Cruz Fernandez
That's great. What would you say were the main topics or. Yeah. Themes, areas that before this decline that you mentioned were, you know, more important in Japanese business history?
- [07:37]
Pierre Yves Doncet
I think the key point is that business history in Japan was not different from what we could see in western countries because the field changed. It's not Japan that changed. The field changed after 2000, 2010, you know, going more towards social sciences, management sciences. And in the 90s it was still very. A field based on history, very chandelier in some aspects. And Japan was like that. And Japanese scholars contributed a lot, having joint research with Western scholars, et cetera. And then the world changed or the. Not all countries, of course, but dominant countries, dominant business historians shifted slightly to social sciences. And this shift cannot be observed in majority in Japan. So that's why there's a growing difference.
- [08:36]
Paula de la Cruz Fernandez
Is that what you call the great divergence?
- [08:39]
Pierre Yves Doncet
Exactly, a great divergence. So international literature, international conferences and international scholarship changed and Japan didn't change. Divergence, which did not exist in the late 20th century.
- [08:55]
Paula de la Cruz Fernandez
Wonderful. All right, so let's go through the chapters or articles. If you want, we can go through the different titles and perhaps explain what are the major arguments. Ken Sakai Yuki Tsukoyama Rio is our unity Sri Nivas talking about rhetorical strategies that legitimized exploitation. And they use assistant nursing in Japan 1951-2000 way of looking at.
- [09:35]
Maki Umemura
I mean, it's a different kind of approach to business history because you're not looking at a large corporation, you're not looking. You're looking at workers, you're looking at workers kind of asserting their rights. So I think in the case of healthcare sector, and I think that it's not so much of this top down perspective business history, so much As a kind of bottom up approach to business history, which might not seem necessarily that new necessarily, but I think it is a little bit of a different angle compared to many of the other business history that we associate Japan with. I think that going back to your earlier point on kind of a Japanese history, I think that my, my understanding of business history tends to be a little bit more that of the English language. And I think that we associate Japanese business history and the English language to be associated with these larger older sector corporations. And I don't think that we kind of see this type of new approach to the study of organizations and workers.
- [10:59]
Paula de la Cruz Fernandez
Yeah, no, that's interesting to study business from kind of the employees or the workers side kind of the business of labor perhaps and how labor is managed.
- [11:14]
Pierre Yves Doncet
The approach is focusing on our workers, how they try to defend, to improve the conditions of workplace. Through our original approach, which is narrative studies. What do actors tell about themselves, how they communicate to the public? Because in the healthcare sector, it's a regulated sector, so it's important to communicate to the stats and to stakeholders and against them. You have doctors that try to continue to exploit somehow nurses and develop a specific narrative that is in contradiction with the narrative from nurses. And you have these narrative studies perspective allow us to shed a new light on how workers try to fight and somehow lose their fight against. Against doctors who are in Japan also usually the owners of clinics. So they are entrepreneurs. That probably the status.
- [12:19]
Paula de la Cruz Fernandez
So how. So how does in this case the. How does historical research like what are the records or sources that in this case are perhaps different from, you know, kind of studying a big corporation or study in other type of sector.
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Pierre Yves Doncet
Other sectors, mostly published sources in trader association journals.
- [12:43]
Paula de la Cruz Fernandez
Very interesting. What about, tell us about the breakfast cereal market in Japan. How is that, you know, what is the history there?
- [12:54]
Pierre Yves Doncet
So it's also a narrative perspective. Narrative approach, but not based on workers or small companies owners, but big corporations. So he focuses on big corporations as we like a lot in Japan. Like with another approach. A traditional approach in Japan would be to talk about innovation, marketing strategies, to show rich and run approach how they expand the sales network and naturally they would sell more cereals. But here focus is on narrative perspectives about what the author talks about value proposition, how companies talk about the product to add value through narratives and. And how they change the narrative they saw through competition and how they. You know, there are different value propositions in competition. Some of them work and some not at first selling. Like in Europe, breakfast for kids was not very useful. You don't increase the sales and the use of cereals. And there are different narratives. In the end, the new narratives was a healthy breakfast for especially for women. And it's a magic value proposition that increased the consumption of cereals. So it's, it's quite a new way to, to discuss marketing strategy in a.
- [14:20]
Maki Umemura
In a country because what people were eating in the 1960s was very different from what they eat today in Japan, which has gone through tremendous economic growth. So it, it is an interesting kind of way to to view how break changed through the lens of this breakfast cereal.
- [14:40]
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- [15:08]
Pierre Yves Doncet
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- [15:10]
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- [15:17]
Maki Umemura
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- [15:21]
Pierre Yves Doncet
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- [15:23]
Maki Umemura
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- [15:26]
Paula de la Cruz Fernandez
You tell us a little bit of how that's, how has that changed? Like what did Japanese people eat for breakfast in the 60s and what do they eat now and what business has to do with it?
- [15:42]
Pierre Yves Doncet
It's a Westernization of. Westernization of, of of eating habits shifting from rice, rice and veggies to cereals, bread, some. And so companies who try to promote this change to use it as an opportunity. But it's not easy to be at the right moment with the right discourse to consumers. And this is a story about that.
- [16:10]
Maki Umemura
It's very interesting because I remember growing up and my father was adamant that we must have rice and miso soup for breakfast. And throughout my childhood it never changed. But you see with what the author also refers to is with the kind of Westernization of the younger generation, generation will be more open to these types of foods. Or that the convenience with women working will also enable people to kind of adopt these. Because, you know, just putting a cereal into a bowl is much easier than cooking rice and a whole bowl of soup. So.
- [16:43]
Paula de la Cruz Fernandez
Yeah, yeah, I would say that's true. I would say that's true. But also rice cookers, they make rice really fast and, and that's easy too. But it's suggested. Exactly. And what role business plays in these changes is really interesting too. So let's then go to what is the role of Korean businesses in Japan and you know, what's the kind of evolution of this role?
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Maki Umemura
Yeah, so I think I'm not sure whether many people are familiar but I think that oftentimes ethnic Korean businesses in Japan are associated with pachinko and also they have a strong ethnic community that has their own business associations. And I think that not a lot of business history in Japan and it's written about has really looked at that sector or has focused on more minority segments of Japanese population. So I know that in the United States there's a whole kind of business histories of black African Americans, but I don't think that that's really been so much of a topic in Japan. What do you think, Pierre Yves?
- [18:15]
Pierre Yves Doncet
Yes, it says there's not enough thing or that, you know, and it's saying that so like in many places, minority business I think business and discrimination from other industries. So they need to develop their own business with a big communities. And that's what did Korean entrepreneurs do with a kind of amusement business with the so called pachinko bottles, what kind of ethnic food, et cetera, et cetera. And the author made a really great work gathering documents or very few documents from trader associations, said Mackie and Phil Durk. She went to these places where there's lots of current business making interviews, et cetera. So it's very original and it shows that there are so I think minorities in Japan and they developed specific strategies to survive and develop.
- [19:13]
Maki Umemura
Yeah, I think the whole area of immigrant entrepreneurship or minority entrepreneurship, whatever minority that may be, is under explored in Japan as is the whole area of small to medium sized enterprises, partly because it has always been crowded out slightly by larger companies, although that's changing. But this is the kind of thing I think that people are interested in and hopefully there'll be more in the future.
- [19:42]
Paula de la Cruz Fernandez
Yeah, absolutely. I see this kind of new interest in small business and also ethnic entrepreneurship and so forth. So we are going to go back to innovation like you mentioned, Pierre, with the article by Kiyosa Kiyohisa, very interesting on Japanese radical innovation. Can you talk a little bit about that article, please?
- [20:10]
Pierre Yves Doncet
I think the most technical article in the issue because you know, researching this testing about innovation in the lead industry, it's not easy technically to understand. The paper is great, I think for two reasons. First, the challenge is a common view of innovation being made by big corporations in labs, incremental and so on. And we always say that Japanese companies are unable to have radical innovation. And he shows why it's difficult because lack of thinking, lack of focus on marketing. So companies usually try to sell innovation after it's done. So if it's radical, it's very difficult if you don't ignore the market. And he showed here how in the serum industry how radical innovation was difficult to be sold and how late commerce used did to rearrange it to answer a need and to sell it. So this is a new way to discuss innovation in Japan which is interesting. Second point is the approach. It's a so called applied business history approach developed by Takeo Kikawa in Japan and unfortunately it's not very known outside of Japan. It's very innovative is the idea. Business historians also could offer some consulting advice to companies. It's not only people from finance, from strategy or I don't know if you learn the history of a case, you can answer some needs, you can explain some problems and find solutions. That's what risk scholars who scholar did showing that even if you don't have show that for small companies that over focus on innovation is bad because we will develop something that you cannot sell. So you need to think it sounds basic but in a country for Japan, you know, it's quite new thinking what integrating marketing within the innovation process. So this is this demonstration which is quite original and that's why we wanted to integrate that also in.
- [22:45]
Maki Umemura
Yeah. Takeo Kikawa has. Has very much kind of proposed, adopted or even sort of tried to in his own work, in his English published work talk talked about this approach of applied business history. I think partly because he wants business history to be more useful. He himself I think sits on kind of policy making and advises business in his area of energy. Is that right? Yeah. So I think that that's the kind of approach that the author adopted and I think that Pierre selected for this special issue.
- [23:28]
Paula de la Cruz Fernandez
That's really useful to know actually for me and I think you're right there is now a trend kind of how to make history useful for you know, for policy, for government and also to serve the needs of businesses. Right. Themselves. So still with innovation and I'm going to have to talk to about this to my. To my children. Tell me about Pikachu. How did that happen? How did it enter the American system all over the world really.
- [24:08]
Pierre Yves Doncet
So Pikachu is also a challenge of innovation in electronics industry. It's not only innovation. It's not a matter of making hardware and new technology in Electronics it is so software good ideas, creativity. And Pikachu is the science of creativity. And Pikachu is not only a. You know, it's a character, it's a cultural good. It's not only a software. And the author showed that if it's a cultural good, it becomes actually a cultural good through an ecosystem of smaller companies. Not only one big company, Nintendo that invented it, but they have lots of independent designers and media companies that are different. To show Pikachu tv, to have game cards and so on. And all these network of actors work together to create cultural values. When you go to the U.S. it's difficult because you cannot transfer the ecosystem. If a story about that Nintendo is in America to sell Pikachu, but you don't have the ecosystem with media and culture is different. So you need to rebuild the ecosystem and to adapt it. That's why Pikachu is slightly different in America than in Japan, because the ecosystem is different. And they discuss this issue, which is very interesting to understand how a country like Japan over focused on manufacturing technology can also use culture to make a big business around the world.
- [25:53]
Paula de la Cruz Fernandez
Let's go over the. In my list of the special issue is how did reciprocity influence financial liberation? Can you talk a little bit more about Japan's financial system and its transformation?
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Pierre Yves Doncet
Yeah. This paper uses a literature about varieties of capitalism and to challenge it to a case study on the evolution of the Japanese financial system. Because the common knowledge is that Japan shifted with liberalization from a bank based system to a market based system. Therefore shipped from credits from banks to borrowing money through the bond markets for companies. It's a trend and the authority shows it exists. But Kisato also showed that it's not only corporation like manufacturing companies that start to use a bond market to finance themselves, but also banks also change themselves. Banks started to engage also in the bond market themselves. So it's not a pure transition or disappear of banks. Banks are still there. There is a bond market. They also take the bonds and sell them to some clients. So they keep still an important place in this transformation despite the transformation. So it's a challenge to a simplistic view that banks are not important anymore because there's a market. The market is organized by actors which are mostly the same banks than before.
- [27:41]
Paula de la Cruz Fernandez
Very interesting. One thing I noticed is that most of the articles, if not all, are post 1950s. Could you perhaps, you know, is this the main focus of Japanese business history post 1950s or.
- [28:02]
Pierre Yves Doncet
It's a good point, actually. If you read the Journal of Japanese History Society, many papers about 19th century because there are sources and so on. But I would say the most innovative papers are on the more contemporary periods. I don't know why, actually, I never think about that. But it's true. And we struggle to find really, really innovative papers. So we have seen very broadly all the new generations of scholars. What do they do? Maybe for the 19th century, if you have lots of available caps, you know, because sometimes the company disappeared, or if you have all documents digitalized and et cetera, it's easier here to have a descriptive approach, a chandelier approach. You create again the evolution of organization of the company and so on. But for the past 45, 1945 period, it's less easy to have access to archives. So we need maybe to use new approaches to discuss some issues. I don't know exactly, but you're right about your comment. It doesn't mean that Japanese scholars do not look at all the rails.
- [29:26]
Maki Umemura
You have many more Japanese companies that have become much more global during that period. Mekken, you know, speak to a global audience. That's probably why the kind of the readings that we have on Japanese business, at least in English, are often slightly more recent. And also I think that the things that interest the younger generation of scholars is a little bit more recent in terms of, you know, institutional change is what Hideaki Sato is working on thinking of like institutions and the kind of hybridization of institutions or things like ecosystems. You know, these are kind of things that you can actually look at a lot more in the more recent industries in a way that you don't probably look at ecosystems of, you know, steel manufacturers or something like that in the same way.
- [30:27]
Pierre Yves Doncet
Yes, I know a few of the. By the way, a few of these authors have worked about the interwar prayers or even the 19th century, but they are much less innovative than in some papers here.
- [30:39]
Paula de la Cruz Fernandez
Right. And that could be actually linked with what you mentioned at the beginning with the management and social sciences being more present Right. In. In business history. Thank you so much. This has been a super informative interview and I think we've covered all of the articles and it's a good introduction to this special issue or to this volume on Japanese business history. Thank you so much for your participation.
- [31:14]
Pierre Yves Doncet
Thanks a lot for your invitation. Paula, it was a pleasure.
- [31:17]
Maki Umemura
Thank you so much.
- [31:18]
Paula de la Cruz Fernandez
Thank you. And to everyone listening on the New Books Network, we hope you enjoy this interview and keep listening to the. To the podcast.