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Constructing the Construction State: Cement and Postwar Japan
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 14 March 2025
Abstract
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This paper inquires into the revival of the cement industry in postwar Japan. The Allied Occupation did not immediately undertake comprehensive plans to rebuild the country's infrastructure. Only after controls on the production of basic industries were lifted in 1948 did cement production begin to rise. By 1956, Japan produced 13,737,594 tons of cement, double that of the prewar peak in 1939. This paper examines the rebirth of the Japanese cement and limestone mining industries in the period between 1945 and 1956 and highlights the cement industry's role in the rebirth of Japan as a “construction state.”
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Notes
1 For Japan's colonial highway construction projects, see M. William Steele, “Roads, Bridges, Tunnels and Empire: Highway Construction and the Great East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere,” Asian Cultural Studies, vol. 42, 2016, 87-101.
2 Doboku Gakkai, ed., Gijutsusha no jiritsu – gijutsu no dokuritsu o motomete, Doboku Gakkai, 2014, 270.
3 Joseph Z. Reday, “Reparations from Japan,” Far Eastern Survey, vol. 18, no. 13 (June 29, 1949), 145-151.
4 For postwar cement use, see Han Jaehyang and Takeda Haruhito, “Sengō fukkyō-ki no semento sangyō,” Tokyo University MMRC Discussion Paper 55 (October 2005).
5 Janis Mimura, Planning for Empire: Reform Bureaucrats and Japan's Wartime State, (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2011); see especially her epilogue: “From Wartime Techno-fascism to Postwar Managerialism,” 195-200.
6 The Asahi shinbun reported that controls would be lifted at the end of the year on October 19, 1949; see also Aso Hyakunenn-shi Hensan I'inkai, ed., Aso hyakunenshi, (Tokyo: Aso Cement Company, 1975), 488 and Shashi Hensan I'inkai, ed., Nihon Cement hyakunen-shi, (Tokyo: Nihon Cement Company, 1983), 449.
7 Asahi shinbun, October 15, 1952.
8 Cement production peaked in the late 1990s at around 100 million tons, declining to 81 million tons in 2000, 69 million tons in 2005, 51 million tons in 2010, and up after 3/11 to just over 60 million tons in 2015. See Nihon tōkei nenkan (Japan Statistical Yearbook), (Tokyo: Sōifu, Tōkeikyoku, Nihon Tōkei Kyōkai), 2016.
9 Quoted in Fujita Minoru, Semento, (Tokyo, Yūhikaku, 1960), 40.
10 “Hitō de semento no yunyū kyoka,” Asahi shinbun, February 18, 1952, 1.
11 The idea of the “construction state” was developed by Gavan McCormack in The Emptiness of Japanese Affluence, revised edition, Routledge, 2015. See Chapter 1, “The Construction State: The Pathology of the Doken Kokka,” 25-77. See also Jeff Kingston, Contemporary Japan: History, Politics, and Social Change since the 1980s, John Wiley & Sons, 2010, 162-64.
12 Gavan McCormack, “Modernity, Water and the Environment,” in William Tsutsui, ed., A Companion to Japanese History, (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 2009), 447.
13 For a short documentary video on the construction of the Sakuma Dam, including the pouring of cement, see “Sakuma Dam” in the Japan Society of Civil Engineers video library.
14 For details on the connection with the New Deal and the TVA, see Eric Dinmore, “Concrete Results? The TVA and the Appeal of Large Dams in Occupation Era,” Journal of Japanese Studies, 39.1 (Winter 2013), 1-38, and Eric Dinmore, “High-Growth Hydrosphere: Sakuma Dam and the Socio-natural Dimensions of ”Comprehensive Development“ Planning in Post-1945 Japan,” in Bruce Batten and Phillip Brown, eds., Environment and Society in the Japanese Islands, (Corvallis, Or.: Oregon State University Press, 2015), 114-135.
15 Aaron Moore, “The Yalu River Era of Developing Asia: Japanese Expertise, Colonial Power, and the Construction of the Sup'ung Dam,” Journal of Asian Studies, 72.1 (February 2013), 115-139. Also see Aaron Moore, Constructing East Asia: Technology, Ideology and Imperialism in Japan's Wartime Era, 1931-1945, (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2013).
16 Dinmore, “High Growth Hydrosphere,” 125.
17 M. William Steele, “History of the Tama River: Social Reconstructions,” in Terje Tvedt, ed., A History of Water, Vol. 1 Water Control and Water Histories, (London: I.B. Tauris Publishers, 2006), 232.
18 Uchida Seizō, et. al., Zusetsu kindai Nihon jūtaku-shi, (Tokyo: Kashima Shuppankai, 2008), 136-37.
19 Uchida, 46-49.
20 Laura Neitzel, The Life We Longed For: Danchi Housing and the Middle Class Dream in Postwar Japan, (Portland, Me.: Merwinasia, 2016).
21 Quoted in Takaaki Nambu, “History of Road Development, Finance and Investment in Japan,” n.d.
22 Seto Masaaki, Jidōsha senyō dōro no sekkei, (Tokyo: Tokiwa Shobō), 1943. Seto was in residence as a civil engineer in Manchukuo assigned to road construction between 1938 and the end of the war.
23 On the prewar origins of the Shinkansen, see Takashi Nishiyama, Engineering War and Peace in Modern Japan, 1868-1964, (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014;) see especially Chapter Seven, “Former Military Engineers and the Development of the Shinkansen, 1957-1964,” 157-183.
24 On the removal of equipment and machinery from cement factories in Manchukuo, see Edwin Pauley, Report on Japanese Assets in Manchuria to the President of the Unitd States, November 1945 to April 1946, Washington: U.S. Government Pinting Office, 1946. See especially Chapter II, “Cement Industry,” 209-219.
25 On similar technological advances in the cement industry in the postwar world, see: Sangaya Lall, Learning to Industrialize: The Acquisition of Technological Capability by India, (London: Palgrave Macmillan Publishers, 1987), 52-74.
26 Thereafter November 15 is known as the Memorial Day for Ready Mix Concrete.
27 Nihon semento nenkan (Japan Cement Annual) for the year 1968, published by the Semento shinbunsha, vol. 20, 1968, 81.
28 For a general history of the limestone industry in postwar Japan, see Shimanishi Tomoki, “Sengō sekkaishi kōgyō-shi,” Mita shōgaku kenkyū, 47.4 (October 2004), 115-138. See also: Maki Yūichirō and Matsumoto Masayuki, “Sekkaishi no kōgyō no genjō to kadai,” Chishitsu News 47 (March 2000), 23-35.
29 General Headquarters Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers (SCAP), Cement Industry of Japan, Natural Resources Section, Report 105, Tokyo, 1948, 37.
30 For a recent book on the resource debate, see Satō Jin, ‘Motazaru kuni’ no shigen ron: jizoku kannō o meguru mō hitotsu no chi, (Tokyo: Tōkyō Daigaku Shuppankai, 2011).
31 Mining production of limestone peaked in the late 1990s. In 1995 output was 201 million tons, declining in 2000 to 185 million tons, in 2005 to 165 million tons, in 2010 to 134 million tons, and rising, after the triple disasters of March 11, 2011, to 148 million tons in 2014. For statistics, see Japan Statistical Yearbook, 2016.
32 “Japan to build a 250-mile-long, four-storey-high wall to stop tsunamis,” The Independent, March 25, 2015.
33 Madeleine Rubenstein, “Emissions from the Cement Industry,” State of the Planet, May 9, 2012, online publication of the Earth Institute at Columbia University.
34 Peter Armstrong, “Architecture in the mono no nai jidai,” in Roman Rosenbaum and Yasuko Claremont, eds., Legacies of the Asia Pacific War: The Yakeato Generation, (London: Routledge, 2011), 225. Original quote derives from Kawazoe Noboru, Gendai kenchiku o tsukuru mono, (Tokyo: Shōkokusha, 1956), 92; and “Rebuilding Japan,” an interview with Peter Armstrong, Radio National (ABC), Saturday Review, August 13, 2005. See also Kimura Toshihiko, “Kenchikuka to konkurito,” Konkurito kōgaku, 18.8 (August 1980), 8-9, for the argument that concrete is a liberating medium allowing architects free artistic expression.
35 Peter Armstrong, “Architecture in the mono no nai jidai,” 225.
36 Adrian Forty, “Concrete and Memory,” in Mark Crinson, ed., Urban Memory: History and Amnesia in the Modern City, (London: Routledge, 2005), 79-80.
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