Japan's manufacturing industry has demonstrated world-class competitiveness in many fields of manufactured goods. In the past three decades, the manufacturing industry in China and South Korea has risen rapidly, thanks in large part to the transfer of manufacturing and technology from Japan.
The comprehensiveness of Japan's manufacturing industry is not simply an average development, but focuses on certain specific fields. Industries such as automobiles, home appliances, shipbuilding, and semiconductors are key pillars of Japan's manufacturing industry. On this basis, Japan has developed supporting industries such as materials industry, parts manufacturing industry, and equipment manufacturing industry to support the development of key industries. This structure forms a virtuous circle, in which key industries and supporting industries promote each other and develop together.
However, in the past two decades, especially in the past ten years, this virtuous circle of Japan's manufacturing industry has gradually been broken. The rapid development of manufacturing in China and South Korea has first compressed the market space of Japanese manufacturing in low-end manufacturing, and then continuously upgraded its own manufacturing industry.
From daily necessities to small household appliances, to high-end home appliances, communication equipment, etc., Chinese and Korean manufacturing continues to squeeze the market space of Japanese manufacturing. For example, Japan's home appliance manufacturing industry has gradually declined under the competition of Chinese and Korean manufacturing, and has almost lost the international market, and many Japanese appliances that used to be popular in the world can now only be seen in the Japanese domestic market.
Although Japanese companies have a strong technological base that they have accumulated over a long period of time and supply parts and industrial raw materials to the world, they are no longer able to occupy the entire industrial chain as they used to, but they are still able to survive. However, the fact that Japan's manufacturing industry as a whole is in decline cannot be concealed.