The twelfth annual meeting of the Business History Society of Japan was held on October 23rd and 24th, 1976, at Senshu University in Tokyo. The meeting was organized by Professor S. Yonekawa, Professor K. Sugiyama, and myself on the common subject of “Comparative Studies in the History of Business Finance.”
The meeting was arranged to compare and discuss business finance in English and Japanese cotton spinning firms and American and Japanese iron and steel mills. The period before World War I was selected for the study of the cotton industry and the inter-war period for the iron and steel industries. The objective of this commontopic session was to investigate how each firm raised long-term and short-term capital and how it used the capital resources thus obtained.
Professor Naosuke Takamura of University of Tokyo examined the financing of the five leading companies in the Japanese cotton spinning industry ; Professor Masaji Arai of Kansai University, Oldham Limited in the Lancashire cotton industry ; Professor Yoshimitsu Imuta of Hosei University, the Japan Steel Tube (Nihon Kokan), the Kobe Steel Works (Kobe Seikosho), and other steel mills ; and Professor Junko Nishikawa of Tokyo Commercial College, the electric-power and the iron and steel industries in the United States.
The major conclusions of this commontopic session were as follows : (1) Fixed capital in the cotton spinning firms was raised in Japan by issuing new stocks and bonds whereas in England it was supplied by loan capital borrowed from the working class living in the neighborhood of the mills. A considerable part of the working capital in the Japanese cotton mills was supplied by the Bank of Japan by discounting the promissory notes issued by the mills. (2) The nature of a holding company in Japan and the United States was notably different, and in addition the kind of financial institutions that supplied resources directly to manufacturing firms were also different in the two countries : in Japan it was mainly banks, whereas in the United States it was mostly investment trust companies. The nature and the method of raising working capital in iron and steel mills both in Japan and the United States were left for future examination.

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