The History of Industrial Cooperation and International Industrial Policy in Post-war Japan: A text analysis based on minutes of the National Diet proceedings (Japanese)

The policy term “industrial cooperation†has long been positioned as a tool of trade strategy in Japan; mainly by the Ministry of International Trade and Industry (and now currently as the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry). In the context of international industrial policy, industrial cooperation is interpreted as a commitment to reciprocal cooperation in the field of industry among countries. Our paper analyzes what post-war Japanese international industrial policy in relation to industrial cooperation was intended to accomplish, by quantitatively evaluating a series of minutes of the National Diet proceedings in which the policy term “industrial cooperation†appears, based on the text-analysis method. According to our analysis, while this term has been used in debates at the National Diet since the 1960s, its use became prominent in the 1980s when Japanese industrial competitiveness was conspicuous. Through detailed analysis of the texts, our paper finds that the international industrial policy issues where industrial cooperation was used as a policy tool evolved from the initial response to the trade conflicts with the United States and the European Commission to issues such as procurement of global natural resources and gain of economic benefits from the rapidly growing ASEAN economies. As suggested by the analysis of industrial cooperation in this paper, it is important to understand policy tools of international industrial policy within the context of the historical background and circumstances of their implementation, even if they are seemingly similar.