DEFINING THE TOPIC

TYPIFIED BY SYNTHETIC detergents, the consumer chemicals industry was one of the industrial sectors that helped advance the Second Industrial Revolution and establish a mass consumption society. In Japan, the consumer chemicals sector traces its history back to the end of the ninteenth century. Its full-scale development, however, arrived only after the Second World War with the full advent of a mass consumption society in Japan. In the post-war period, especially in the 1950s and 1960s, in this industry like many others in Japan, the gap in technology and management techniques between Japan and the West, especially the United States, was very large. Consequently, the impact from the United States was overwhelming. In the Japanese consumer chemicals manufacturing industry, firms actively learned from the United States and attempted to catch up.

This chapter examines this era of full-scale development in Japan's consumer chemicals industry during the 1950s and 1960s. It will focus on one of the leading firms in the sector, Kao Soap, currently Kao, and will clarify both the firm's strategy for catching up with American industry and the firm's business activities. Since its founding in 1887 and its entry into soap manufacture in 1890, Kao has long occupied, along with its primary competitor Lion Soap, now Lion, a leading position in the Japanese consumer chemicals market. Currently, it is diversifying from soap and synthetic detergents into cosmetics, hygiene products, and so on. Even though Western firms like Procter & Gamble and Unilever have fully entered Japan, Kao continues to maintain its position. In recent years it has developed plans to expand actively into Western and Asian markets as well.

In the 1990s Kao became one of Japan's outstanding firms, receiving high marks for its production technology, research and development, marketing and distribution, as well as both its management and its internal sharing and disclosure of information. In terms of information disclosure and corporate governance, Kao is regarded as riding the crest of the globalization wave. At the same time, however, the company also holds out a more singular management philosophy. The previous chairman of Kao, Fumikatsu Tokiwa, in pointing out and criticizing Japanese companies’ enthusiasm for things American, most strongly insisted that Kao was a firm with a Japanese corporate identity.