Rock the Dragon

Pacific Rim Culture 1945-1975

Few large-scale social transformations can match the scale and scope of the rise of the Pacific Rim from a war-ravaged periphery to a global economic powerhouse. The well-publicized rise of Sony, Matsushita, Toyota and many other firms to powerhouse status is just the flip side of the rise of the Pacific Rim culture, that unruly admixture of ancient graphic arts and state-of-the-art anime, traditional folk songs and karaoke bars, Godzilla flicks and Hong Kong blockbusters.

I. 1945-55: Reconstruction

The core regions of East Asia – Japan and the so-called “dragon economies” (Hong Kong, Singapore, Taiwan and South Korea) lay in ruins after WW II and ensuing domestic civil wars in Korea and China. When the firing finally ceased after the Korean armistice in 1952, the US and the USSR stepped in with large amounts of military and economic assistance to their allies (China and North Korea for the USSR, and South Korea, Taiwan and Japan for the US). During the 1950s, a wave of anti-colonial movements swept throughout Asia, overthrowing British, French and Dutch colonialist regimes everywhere from Malaysia to Vietnam, and Indonesia to India.

Media

Godzilla (1954) Inoshiro Honda. Raymond Burr and the birth of multinational allegory

Fires on the Plain, Kon Ichikawa (year?)

Apu trilogy, Satyajit Ray

Texts

Diary of Darkness

Hiroshima Diary Michihiko Hachiya (1955)

Ho Chi Minh: Appeal to Fight Illiteracy

Ho David Halberstam (54)

The Seven Stars Toru Matsumoto (Japan in the 1950s)

II. 1955-1965: Spawning the Lizard

The Cold War quickly turned a hot war in Asia, as US military supplies, advisers and troops poured into Vietnam, in a bloody and futile attempt to defeat the Vietnamese Revolution. While US military Keynesianism kept the East Asian core economies afloat during the 1950s, East Asia’s economic renaissance really began in the early 1960s, when a variety of powerful developmental states quietly emerged throughout the region.

Media

Bullet in the Head John Woo (opening sequence, set in the late 1960s)

The High and the Low Kurosawa (1963)

Texts 

The Red Book and the Great Wall Alberto Moravia (1968) Excellent account of Hong Kong in the 1960s

The Sorrow of War. Bao Ninh. Original title: Than Phan Tinh Yeu, or literally, The Lovers’ Destiny.

100 Million Japanese Masataka Kosaka. (Chapter 8: After One Decade). (1972) The three electric treasures.

Disparaged Success Ikuo Kume (LDP in 1960s)

Emigrant Entrepreneurs Wong Siu-Lin (1988) (“Chapter 3: Industrial Skills and Resources”, explains how expatriate Shanghai capital financed the Hong Kong boom)

“Living Rooms as Factories”, in: Women, the State, and Taiwan’s Economic Development

Tim Craig, “Location and implementation issues in support function FDI: The Globalisation of Matsushita Electric Industrial Co., Ltd.” (Asia Pacific Journal of Management, Vol. 14, 143-164) (1997)

III. 1965-75: Godzilla Grows a Brain

By the 1970s, the Cold War began winding down in Asia. The Vietnamese had defeated the US colonial war on their nation, and US influence over the region began its inevitable decline. What took the place of unquestioned US hegemony was a uniquely East Asian capitalism, which would spread from its heartlands in Japan and the dragon economies to Southeast Asia and coastal China in the late 1970s, and rural China and Vietnam in the late 1980s.

Media

Gojira Vs. Mechagojira (1975)

Enter the Dragon (1973) Bruce Lee’s signature blockbuster

Texts

Yasuhiro Monden, Toyota Production System (1983)

The Developmental State. Ed. Meredith Woo-Cumings. “Chapter 3: Webs with No Spiders”, Bruce Cumings (61-92)

Alliance Capitalism Michael Gerlach

Asia’s Next Giant Alice Amsden

Portraits of the Japanese Workplace. Kumazawa Makoto

Korean Dynasty Donald Kirk (1994)