British trading companies and tacit knowledge seeding: diversifying Japanese industrialisation, 1906–1918

This paper analyses the broadening out of Japanese industrialisation into new sectors after the Russo-Japanese War. It does so by compiling new evidence to analyse the emergence of a rubber industry in Kobe – one which later swept global markets with rubber footwear in the inter-war period. Rubber manufacturing knowledge was seeded in Japan by British trading company H. & W. Greer, who established factories in Kobe for J. G. Ingram and Dunlop. In a process adhering closely to Steven Klepper’s heritage theory, workers who had acquired tacit rubber compounding knowledge from Ingram and Dunlop formed a string of Japanese spin-off firms which clustered around the two factories. This study emphasises the role of firm-specific foreign knowledge compatible with local conditions in latecomer development. It also improves our understanding of the role of British trading companies in the global spread of industrial knowledge during the first era of globalisation.