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To better understand the reasons for the marketability of clothing now designed and sold in China and Japan, we asked Japanese and Chinese experts to evaluate Chinese and Japanese brands of clothing currently for sale in the Japanese market. The marketability of the Chinese apparel items in the Japanese market was evaluated by the Japanese experts. Five Japanese jackets were purchased from a department store in Tokyo, and ten items of Chinese clothing were purchased from a department store in Beijing. Five of the Chinese clothing samples were judged as impossible to sell in Japanese department stores primarily because the sewing quality was incompatible with Japanese requirements, the designs were outdated, and the materials were of low quality. However, the other five Chinese clothing samples received high evaluations of marketability in Japan. We found that Japanese experts focused on general design and sewing finish, while Chinese experts considered more general design points. Thus, our results indicate that clothing is evaluated differently in Japan and China. We conclude that it is necessary to consider the respective evaluation points used in each country as we pursue globalisation.

The aim of the present study was to evaluate how the business-to-business (B2B) networks in the Japanese textile and apparel industry changed between 2005 and 2010 using data on 200 companies. Network analysis was used to study the properties of the B2B networks, and how their structures changed was characterized using the USD/JPY exchange rate. The network analysis revealed power-law properties of the B2B networks, and the core networks characterized by the largest degree centrality exhibited positive correlations with the USD/JPY exchange rate. By contrast, the peripheral networks characterized by the network path length exhibited the negative correlations with the exchange rate USD/JPY. Therefore, the changes that occurred in the B2B networks are explained as the complementarity of comparative advantages originating in the USD/JPY exchange rate. Moreover, the USD/JPY exchange rate affected the B2B networks through not only the complementarity of importing and exporting but also by changing the structures.

This chapter presents a historical analysis of the postwar changes in U.S. trade policy: the emergence of the early postwar reciprocal-trade regime in textiles and apparel, as it was first developed between the United States, Japan, and the Big Three—Hong Kong, Taiwan, and South Korea. Supreme Commander of the Allied Powers (SCAP)'s effort to rebuild Japanese industry entailed the reconstruction of Japan's prewar textile industry. The reconstruction of Japan's textile industry led to the opening of the U.S. market to imports of low-cost Japanese textiles and apparel. Eisenhower was trying to promote Japanese exports to the United States. The occupation improved the status of Japan's women textile workers, and SCAP continued to set wages. The process of making low-wage textiles and apparel in export-processing zones was forged early in the context of America's postwar efforts to contain communism in East Asia.

Since its early days of mass production in the 1850s, the sewing machine has been intricately connected with the global development of capitalism. Andrew Gordon traces the machine's remarkable journey into and throughout Japan, where it not only transformed manners of dress, but also helped change patterns of daily life, class structure, and the role of women. As he explores the selling, buying, and use of the sewing machine in the early to mid-twentieth century, Gordon finds that its history is a lens through which we can examine the modern transformation of daily life in Japan. Both as a tool of production and as an object of consumer desire, the sewing machine is entwined with the emergence and ascendance of the middle class, of the female consumer, and of the professional home manager as defining elements of Japanese modernity.

The Singer Corporation in the first decades of the new century established itself as a pioneer in selling mass-produced, brand-name goods in Japan. As it did so, its sales force and teachers and their customers, together with magazine editors, educators, and state officials who mediated their interaction, gave multiple meanings to the sewing machine. They linked it to changes in women’s habits of dress and their roles in the family and wider economy. They discussed it in debates over women’s contribution to progress and the modern nation. Various mediators were far from united in their views. Some sewing teachers argued

Rates of sewing machine ownership more than doubled over the 1930s, reaching nearly one in ten households by the decade’s end. Demand remained strong into the early 1940s. The enduring desire for this good and for the Western-style dress that it fabricated reflected the force of a modern spirit that for several decades had embraced technologies and life ways identified with the West in general and America in particular. Unfolding from the late 1930s, a drive to reform both men’s and women’s dress reflected the ongoing and related search for a Japanese-inflected modern life. As both object of desire and