Management Policies and Industrial Sector Ecology in Japan's postware Machine-tools Industry to the 1980s

This is an exploration, using Japanese language primary sources, of management policies and relat-ed industrial sector ecology of the post-World War II machine tools industry. From postwar devas-tation to global leader in worldwide market share by the mid-1980s, remarkably little is know of the factors that contributed to this sucess. Paralleling Max Holland’s 1989 Burgmaster case study method of the U.S. firm’s and industry failure, this study examines the history of Okuma Corpora-tion, an Aichi Prefecture machine tools producer. The role of management leaders and government support for viable firms is shown to provide the necessary industrial ecology for machine tools pro-ducers to recover, innovate, deal with successive oil shocks, and achieve a leadership role in the machine tools sector. Comparative reflections on the parallel decline of the U.S. machine tools in-dustrial sector conclude the paper