Japanese Colonial Investments in the Post-WWI Era : An Analysis of the Business Undertakings of Medium and Small Capitalists (Japanese Capitalism and the Colonies)

Abstract

From the end of World War I to 1920, Japanese investments in colonized Taiwan, Korea and Manchuria increased rapidly. The purpose of this article is to clarify the actual conditions of these investments, and in particular those made by medium- and small-sized enterprises. This purpose has two implications. On the one hand, by paying attention to the medium- and small-sized enterprises that advanced into the colonies, the article attempts to fill in the gap in the studies in this field, because most of the studies available on Japanese colonial investments in the period concerned have dealt primarily with the investments by large enterprises, such as state enterprises and those belonging to zaibatsu groups, and have thus failed to clarify the multilayered composition of enterprises in the colonies. On the other hand, the article is also meant to make a contribution to the study on Japanese emigration. The reason for this is as follows. In the theory of colonial policy, colonies are classified into two types, the settlement colonies and the investment colonies; but the Japanese colonies had the features of the two types. Given this fact, therefore, an analysis of minor enterprises in the Japanese colonies is closely related to an inquiry into the emigration of medium and small businessmen. This article carries out an analysis from the following three viewpoints: 1) comparison of Taiwan, Korea and Manchuria with each other; 2) clarification of the place which medium- and small-sized Japanese enterprises occupied in the economies of the three coolnies; and 3) clarification the interrelationship between colonial investments and emigration. The major conclusions reached are as follows. It was in Manchuria that minor enterprises made their investments most actively and speculatively, with their investments in Korea following next. Most of the investment funds were not raised in Japan but in the colonies themselves, and most of the medium- and small-sized enterprises that were established in the period under discussion were established by those who had emigrated to the colonies in the earlier period. This means that the increase in colonial investments toward the end of the 1910s was not accompanied by a corresponding increase in Japanese emigrants. Japanese enterprises' control over the local colonial economy was most extensive in Korea, while in Manchuria they were met with very strong counterbalancing power of indigenous Chinese enterprises. Consequently, when medium- and small-sized Japanese enterprises in the colonies were hit by business depression following the crisis of 1920, those operative in Manchuria, where many of them were speculative and were met with strong counterbalancing power of indigenous enterprises, suffered most seriously.