明治中後期～大正初期における企業の原料調達と地域社会との関係

―煉瓦製造業の原土調達をめぐる活動の分析から―

抄録

This article examines the economic significance of companies’ relationships to local communities in the area of raw‒materials procurement. The discussion is based on a case study of the brick industry, which had factories in agricultural areas. This research investigates ways of sourcing dirt given that it was not an established market, and considers the sorts of relationships that were built with local communities in the process.

The first example, Kanamachi‒Seiga, built a factory in Kanamachi Village on the outskirts of the major consumer market that was Tokyo, did not buy dirt but rather the commonly traded asset of land from which it extracted dirt. However, until the end of the first decade of the 1900s, the company bought land from absentee landlords or those with whom it had personal connections. After that, it began buying land from landlords residing in the village but even then, it could not conduct purely economic transactions in land but rather had to adapt to the customs of local communities.

The second example, Nihon Renga Seizo, built its factory in Fukaya, Saitama, an area of high‒quality dirt, and was able to establish a trade in dirt with local contractors as intermediaries, meaning that the direct connections in local communities made up for absence of a market in dirt. At the time of its founding, Eiichi Shibusawa envisioned procuring dirt for free from the area around the factory. The company, however, was wary of this plan because it depended heavily on the favor of local communities, so the company chose instead to transactions based on payments. The labors who mined dirt were not employed directly by Nihon Renga Seizo but worked for contractors in the local communities. In this way, too, the relationship between the company and local communities made up for the undeveloped nature of the labor market.

In conclusion, this study shows that relationships with local communities supported the activities of companies not only in financing, as has been shown in previous studies, but in various other situations as well. This does not mean, however, that companies were the only ones to benefit. From about the end of the first decade of the 1900s, local communities in Japan began increasing their demands of companies, and the transactions were subject to constant negotiation.