富岡製糸場のおともに

How Asia Works: Success and Failure in the World's Most Dynamic Region (2013/03/28) Joe Studwell 商品詳細を見る

随分と混んでいそうなのでまだ足を運んでいませんが、富岡製糸場には行ってみたいと思っています。日本の近代化を考える上で、興味深い本を読みました。land reform; export-led, state-backed manufacturing; and financial repressionというのは日本ではおなじみのものかもしれませんが、アジア全体をこの視点で見直すとどうなるかも描いてくれています。

Going for growth
Explaining Asia’s economic success is as easy as one, two, three
Jul 13th 2013 | From the print edition

But Mr Studwell’s own manifesto for economic success does resemble the Washington consensus in one respect: it holds that poor economies can prosper by following a short recipe of tried and tested policies. This is now an unfashionable approach among economists, who have turned their attention from policies to “institutions”: the social and political constraints that weigh on ministers, whatever policies they avow. Most authors shy away from prescriptions for success, arguing that every development dish is different.
Mr Studwell has no such inhibitions. Asia’s post-war miracle economies emerged, he argues, by following a recipe with just three ingredients: land reform; export-led, state-backed manufacturing; and financial repression.

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Mr Studwell’s recipe is not original: the formula dates back at least 140 years, he shows, to Japan under the Meiji emperor. Only the first step, smallholder farming, would be backed by this newspaper. But “How Asia Works” is a striking and enlightening book, which reflects the author’s unusual career. Having worked as an analyst (for the Economist Intelligence Unit, our sister company) and a consultant, he wrote books on China’s seduction of foreign businessmen and Asia’s crony capitalists. Then he went back to school, embarking on a doctorate at Cambridge, home to a number of unorthodox economists.
The result is a lively mix of scholarship, reporting and polemic. Its heart is a historical account of how smallholder farming, export-led manufacturing and financial repression took root in Asia’s miracle economies, such as Japan and Taiwan, but failed to bed down in the Philippines and Indonesia. This is punctuated by travelogues, describing Asia’s landscape of economic triumph and tribulation, from the kitsch houses of rice farmers in Japan’s Niigata prefecture, who have great agricultural know-how but little architectural taste, to the unfinished towers of Jakarta’s Bank Alley, their growth stunted by the Asian financial crisis.

フィールドワーク的な視点も大事にしていて、具体例が説得力を増しています。土地改革の部分は秩父事件から米どころの新潟に向かうところから始まっています。

Entering the forest north-west of Tokyo, highway 299 winds up through the hills until it reaches Chichibu, a sleepy, nondescript town with no definable centre. Chichibu's name is synonymous in Japan with the largest farmer rebellion of the Meiji-era, put down by state police and troops in 1884.

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North of Chichibu and Minano,the KanEtsu expressway now tunnels its way under the peaks of central Honshu. Speeding along this highway, the pattern you will notice is that when ever a flattish area occurs among the hills and mountains and forest, it is filled to bursting with urban and industrial construction.

ここからは英語学習的な視点の話ですが、国道はhighway、高速道路はexpresswayを使っていますね。普通に使い分けているなと思ったら、すぐ後に、Speeding along this highwayと高速道路について語っているので、2つがオーバーラップしている部分もあるようですね（苦笑）

（Wikipedia）
National Route 299 is a national highway of Japan connecting Chino, Nagano and Iruma, Saitama in Japan, with a total length of 189.3 km (117.63 mi).

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The Kan-Etsu Expressway (関越自動車道 Kan'etsu Jidōsha-dō?) is a national expressway in Japan. It is owned and managed by East Nippon Expressway Company.

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The Chichibu Incident (秩父事件 Chichibu jiken?) was a large scale peasant revolt that occurred in November 1884 in Chichibu, Saitama, a short distance from Japan's capital, and lasted approximately two weeks.

It was one of many similar uprisings in Japan around that time, occurring in reaction to the dramatic and drastic changes to society which came about in the wake of the 1868 Meiji Restoration.[1] What set Chichibu apart was the scope of the uprising, and the severity of the government’s response.