Jeffrey W. Alexander's Japan's Motorcycle Wars: An Industry History is a welcome addition to the business history research on Japan, and the first scholarly history in English of motorcycle manufacturing in Japan. Alexander shows that corporations that had “wartime precision manufacturing and management experience” (p. 111) were able to leverage this knowledge in the making of motorcycles after the Second World War. He also reveals that motor vehicle licensing rules and road-building initiatives helped fuel a domestic market for motorbikes. Throughout its exploration of these themes and many more, Motorcycle Wars uncovers the fierce competition that raged within the industry during its formative postwar decades, reintroducing to history the many unknown motorcycle companies that made up the Japanese industry after World War II but did not survive to become one of the Big Four brand names (Honda, Kawasaki, Suzuki, and Yamaha) we know today.
Alexander's book will easily take a prominent place alongside the English-language classic in the business history of Japanese motor vehicles, Michael A. Cusumano's The Japanese Automobile Industry: Technology and Management at Nissan and Toyota (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1985), and also Steven J. Ericson's The Sound of the Whistle: Railroads and the State in Meiji Japan (Cambridge, Mass.: Council on East Asian Studies, 1996) on the history of the train as the first modern mode of transportation. Alexander draws direct inspiration from the studies of Cusumano and others on Japan's auto industry. By taking on the subject of motorcycles rather than the more frequently studied automobile, however, Alexander's work expands our knowledge of the history of motor industries in Japan. It makes use of industry publications and corporate histories, but also, importantly, Japanese transcripts, published in 1972, of taped interviews with individuals who had been involved in more than a dozen motorcycle companies between 1908 and the early 1960s.
One of Alexander's best accomplishments is to demonstrate how the motorcycle industry was shaped by regulatory and infrastructural change, interrelated elements that are encapsulated nicely in his phrase “the transportation equation” (pp. 5, 85). As the national government passed road development laws at the beginning of the 1920s, motorcycles and other motor vehicles competed on urban roadways in noisy confusion with horse-drawn stagecoaches, oxcarts, bicycles, and rickshaws. Japanese noted with excitement—and initially some alarm—the rise of the “mixed traffic society” (p. 36). Legal changes easing the restrictions on motorcycle driver licensing during the 1950s simultaneously lowered the driving age for motorcycles and removed the examination requirements to operate bikes up to 125 cc. This relaxation of the rules threw open the market for motorbikes, and by the end of the decade, Japanese manufacturers were producing more than half a million light bikes a year.
One thing comes through clearly: although competing internationally eventually mattered, the development of a large domestic market was essential to the later global dominance of Japanese motorcycle firms. A “rapidly motorizing” (p. 129) public during the 1950s and 1960s generated huge sales and allowed makers of popular small bikes such as the Honda Cub to make investments in mass production capabilities that subsequently aided overseas market penetration. Here, the facts on the ground across an entire industry undercut the emphasis so often placed on the so-called export-led character of the Japanese economy during those decades and on the much vaunted Japanese focus on savings.
Examining the motorcycle industry as a whole “rather than simply . . . the history of its surviving firms” (p. 6), Alexander also demonstrates the absence of any examples of success on the part of the Big Four Japanese motorcycle giants, which was hard won and achieved only after overcoming numerous challenges. By the mid-1950s, more than 200 Japanese motorbike firms vied for domestic customers. It was a great pleasure in Motorcycle Wars to learn the names of such former motorcycle makers as Monarch, Rikuo, Katayama, Meguro, Tokyo, and Rocket, all of which played their part in the history of the industry but were eclipsed by rivals or done in by their own failures.
The rivalries, alliances, and betrayals that characterized the industry after the war extended to the tumultuous relations between motorcycle makers and their subcontracting suppliers and dealers. Here, we get an inside look at manufacturing not as a rational engineering problem, but as warfare, as in Alexander's title. To the study of industrial change, Alexander has injected the personalities, the gambles, the accidents, the foreclosed options, the deceits, and the luck that drove business successes and also its failures. In its portrayal of a cut-throat world of business startups, Motorcycle Wars calls to mind other works from the last decade and a half (e.g., Simon Partner's Assembled in Japan: Electrical Goods and the Making of the Japanese consumer [Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1999] and Bob Johnstone's We Were Burning: Japanese Entrepreneurs and the Forging of the Electronic Age [New York: Basic Books, 1999]) that are building a compelling scholarship on twentieth-century Japanese entrepreneurship.
Finally, it must be said that this enjoyable book comes to a rather sudden end. The lack of any real conclusion leaves the reader wishing for a bit more in the way of a historian's final insights. Given the important ways in which Motorcycle Wars adds to our understanding of manufacturing competition in Japan, many possible topics suggest themselves as ripe for some broader historiographical or economic-historical reflection, the role, say, of motor vehicle manufacturers in the creation of domestic consumer markets or the odd tenacity of images of Japanese economic actors as risk adverse followers. This lament about the ending of the book really serves as a compliment regarding the many intriguing topics that Alexander raises. His work is an invaluable account, filled with important contextual insight and wonderfully illuminating case studies in the history of one of the most successful international industries in Japan and one of the most inherently exciting of manufactured products.
