Japanese SMEs and Independence: A Different View
回应Dana(1998)关于日本中小企业依赖大型企业联盟的观点，通过变化、结构和独立性三个主题，论证日本中小企业具有历史延续的自主性和适应能力。
In the October 1998 issue of this Journal, Dana (1998) discusses the role of small and medium-sized enterprises (chusbo kigyo) within the Japanese business structure. Attention is chiefly directed towards industrial SMEs, defined by the Small and Medium Enterprise Agency(1) as having no more than 300 employees or capitalized at less than [yen]100 million. The contention is that the strong inclination of Japanese firms to form linkages has resulted in a unique small business sector which plays a more prevalent part and employs a much larger percentage of the workforce than in, for example, the United States. Such linkages are consolidated by means of business alliances, notable among which are diversified enterprise groups (keiretsu), groupings of small firms in similar business lines (sanchi), cooperatives of small firms (kyodokumiai), and subcontracting arrangements (shita-uke). While Dana implies that these alliances are not mutually exclusive, the fact that small firms are obliged to participate in business through them and function within the parameters set by them renders SMEs captive to these larger entities. Having worked in Japanese SMEs and written fairly extensively about them over recent years, it is my view that Professor Dana's description and conclusion call for considerable qualification, a task I pursue here by way of three interrelating themes: change, structure, and independence. Change Japan's economy is undergoing the throes of an accelerating upheaval. Internal dynamics, such as population aging, and external forces, encapsulated under the rubric of globalization, are reshaping the business environment in Japan. Former practices are becoming obsolete and relationships are being transformed. Change has been a factor in the life of the Japanese artisan and small businessman for a long time, and in contemplating economic change in light of the Japanese context, two points are important. First, Japan's modern commercialization has roots going back to the early seventeenth century (Moulder 1977), this being accompanied by the concentration of craftsmen and tradesmen in castle towns (Leupp 1992) and the development of specialized manufacturing sites by the local autocrats (daimyo) during the two-and-a-half centuries of the Tokugawa Shogunate (Moriya 1990). Second, the government acquired an unusually integrated character whereby the village headman, the prototype for today's regional officials and local business leaders, assumed responsibilities for infrastructure and tax collection in a cohesive structure which coiled upward ultimately to the national polity (Whitley 1994). Thus, although reciprocity was admittedly heavily weighted towards the higher orders, it nevertheless was viable enough to give a sense of participation within the larger social institutions to those below, as opposed to Chinese society where the onus of trust and obligation lay with the family (Gates 1996). This sense of participation is also evident in the role played by artisans and their small businesses from the beginning of Japan's industrial revolution, which offers a stark contrast to Thompson's (1991) account of the devastation and demise of English craftsmen earlier in the nineteenth century. For reasons not so much to do with enlightened empathy on the part of officialdom but more with the dire sense of urgency in the face of the Western menace and limited resources to meet the challenge, the mission allocated to small enterprises was the upgrading of technology in traditional industry and adapting it to modern demands. An example of this is the shift of some in the porcelain industry to the production of ceramic components (Morris-Suzuki 1992). Small businesses were also established by engineers who had gained experience in shipbuilding and then elected to act as subcontractors for their former employers (Dore 1977), or by traditional craftsmen who gravitated from repair work into manufacturing like Hisahige Tanaka, the founder of Toshiba (Whittaker 1997). …