Japanese Bicycle Industry

= as an example of distributed small-scale production

Discussion

Kevin Carson [1]:

"Such small shops, networking together for distributed production of parts for a common peer-produced design, may well become the backbone of a networked manufacturing economy on the Emilia-Romagna model. A good prototype for the emergence of such a networked industrial model is Jane Jacobs' account of the Japanese bicycle industry.

The industry had its origins in the production in bicycle shops of replacement parts for Western bikes:

...shops to repair [imported bicycles] had sprung up in the big cities.... Imported spare parts were expensive and broken bicycles were too valuable to cannibalize the parts. Many repair shops thus found it worthwhile to make replacement parts themselves--not difficult if a man specialized in one kind of part, as many repairmen did. In this way, groups of bicycle repair shops were almost doing the work of manufacturing entire bicycles. That step was taken by bicycle assemblers, who bought parts, on contract, from repairmen: the repairmen had become "light manufacturers." (Jane Jacobs, The Economy of Cities (New York: Vintage Books, 1969, 1970), pp. 63-64.)

This dovetails with speculation by an assortment of other writers on decentralist economics, including Colin Ward, Keith Paton and Karl Hess.

Ward suggests, for example,

- the pooling of equipment in a neighborhood group. Suppose that each member of the group had a powerful and robust basic tool, while the group as a whole had, for example, a bench drill, lathes and a saw bench to relieve the members from the attempt to cope with work which required these machines with inadequate tools of their own, or wasted their resources on under-used individually-owned plant. This in turn demands some kind of building to house the machinery: the Community Workshop. (Colin Ward, Anarchy in Action (London: Freedom Press, 1982), p. 94.)

Such workshops might bridge the gap between leisure and self-employment, and enable the unemployed to "make a livelihood for themselves." He cites the example of the New Towns in Britain, where

- it has been found necessary and desirable to build groups of small workshops for individuals and small businesses engaged in such work as repairing electrical equipment or car bodies, woodworking and the manufacture of small components. The Community Workshop would be enhanced by its cluster of separate workplaces for 'gainful' work. Couldn't the workshop become the community factory, providing work or a place for work for anyone in the locality who wanted to work that way, not as an optional extra to the economy of the affluent society which rejects an increasing proportion of its members, but as one of the prerequisites of the worker-controlled economy of the future?