Shashi: the Journal of Japanese Business and Company History

From the Editor

Martha Chaiklin — 2024-04-26

The Trials and Tribulations of Accessing Corporate Archives in Japan

Tom Learmouth — 2024-04-26

A lack of accessible corporate archival material has long been a challenge for researchers of Japanese business history. This note digs deeper into the key issues associated with accessing company archives in Japan and proposes several research strategies. It does so by documenting and analysing attempts to access company archives as part of my own research into the absorption of foreign knowledge and technology in the Japanese rubber industry between 1900 and 1965. The assumption is that the lessons from this research project are applicable to corporate archive access issues in Japan more broadly.

「新しい共感覚」が切り拓く未来の地平を目指して

Atsuo Arai — 2024-04-26

David Howarth, Adventurers: The Improbable Rise of the East India Company: 1550-1650 New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2022. 480 pp. ISBN:978-0300250725

Peter Good — 2024-04-26

Jessamyn R. Abel, Dream Super-Express: A Cultural History of the World’s First Bullet Train Stanford CA: Weatherhead East Asian Institute/Stanford University Press, 2022. 302 pp. ISBN: 9781503610385

Janet Hunter — 2024-04-26

Tokugawa-French Economic Relations on the Eve of the Meiji Restoration

Mark Ericson — 2024-04-26

This article examines the efforts of the Tokugawa Bakufu and France to establish an economic dimension to their special relationship in the years before the Meiji Restoration. This aspect of the bilateral relationship is much less known than others, such as the French military mission to train Tokugawa troops and the construction of the Yokosuka naval dockyard. Attempts were made to give France a leading role in the sericulture trade, to establish a joint Japanese-French trading company, and to use Japanese resources as collateral for French financing of the Bakufu’s plans to reform and strengthening its military. The unstable economic situation in Europe, the opposition of rival Treaty Powers, and the sudden Meiji Restoration coup resulted in the failure of these efforts.

Exporting Electrodes to Australia in the 1930s:

Simon James Bytheway — 2024-06-19

Using the internal records of trading companies operating in Australia that were seized by the Australian government after the Japanese attack on Pearl in December 1941, the present study examines the role played by Okura & Company and its Managing Director in Sydney, Sawada Shigeo, as intermediaries in the development of a potential Australian market for Japanese electrodes in the interwar period. International trade in foreign markets required Japanese manufacturers to respond “flexibly” to the terms, conditions, and practices of the new markets into which they were exporting, especially in relation to any technological difficulties (real or perceived) with their products. General trading companies (like our example, Okura & Company) were employed to provide essential market information and to bridge any “gaps of recognition” between Japanese manufacturers (like our example, Tokai Electrode Manufacturing Company) and their new, non-Japanese clients. The interwar experience of “market development” in Australia was integral to the remarkable success of Japan’s export-oriented industries during the postwar reconstruction period, when electrode manufacturing quickly became an important export industry for Japan.