Japan's Export‒Promotion Policy in the Interwar Period:

An Analysis of Export Agencies

Abstract

This paper aims to clarify the prewar development and operation of Japan’s export agencies, which were established essentially to obtain trade and economic information valuable for promoting exports. While large enterprises rarely made use of it, small and medium‒sized commercial and industrial firms, which could not easily obtain information about overseas markets on their own, took advantage of the information provided by such agencies. The proportion of these small and medium‒sized firms in exports was significant in pre‒war Japan. Thus, one can conclude that export agencies contributed to Japan’s exports before the war.

This paper focuses particularly on the following three areas : (1) The development of export agencies during the interwar period ; (2) the relationship between the government and local administrative organizations concerning the export agency and the procurement of trade and economic information ; and (3) the wartime development of the agencies and changes in their functions.

The results of this research show that local governments actively utilized export agencies in the 1920s and 1930s. Earlier research had focused mainly on the development of the agencies by the central government (Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Ministry of Commerce and Industry). The present analysis shows that during the interwar period, Japan’s central and local governments built complex information network spread throughout the world. At the same time, the local governments tried to promote exports using the networks created by the central government. The local governments then gradually became more independent of the central government and its agencies, creating export opportunities of their own.

This paper also examines the government export agencies during the war years. It suggests that the national and local governments pursued export promotion in different ways. The central government’s aim was to acquire foreign currency and it therefore established export agencies outside the yen bloc. Local governments, by contrast, sought export markets within the Japanese empire, and so they established agencies within the yen bloc. As the war spread and the wartime control economy took hold, the central government addressed the divergence by shutting down the local government agencies. After the war, the functions of the export agencies were concentrated in the central government and handed over to JETRO (the Japan External Trade Organization), which retains control of these functions to this day.