The purpose of this article is to analyze the development of entrepreneurial activities of the Youemon Sasaki family at Shin'ichi in Bingo region which is located in the eastern part of Hiroshima Prefecture during the period after the Showa panic (1930-31) until the wartime (July, 1937-August, 1945). The author utilized such various materials as the oral history, the printed matters and the Sasaki archives to accomplish the above purpose.
Youemon Sasaki, successful local wholesale merchant, were seriously hit by the Showa panic, and thereafter, the restructuring by the young leader, Gi'ichi Sasaki, became unavoidable. Gi'ichi closed the weaving factories established in 1915, began sewing business, came to sell new commodities such as wide cloths and garments to the local areas and continued seeking such gains as dividends and rents of land and houses.
At the wartime Gi'ichi greatly committed himself to sewing business and kept the wealthy local businessman by becoming a salaried manager in Bingo Tokumen Kasuri Moto Haikyu Kabusiki Kaisha (Bingo Kasuri Distribution Company) and Huhaku Seihin Chuo Seizo Haikyu Tosei Kabushiki Kaisha (Cloth Goods Central Manufacturing Distribution Company). He also earned lots of money through dividends of shares during wartime.
In recent years many economic and business historians in Japan are making great efforts to describe the local entrepreneurial activities in the prewar years, and this article is also included in such an academic trend.

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The entertainment industry of pachinko, Japanized pinball machines, is a unique business to Japan. Although its total market size exceeds that of such significant industries as iron and steel and chemicals, history research has long neglected this business. Partially it is because in the mind of ordinary people the industry still remains in the gray zone of legalized yet antisocial gambling that is characterized by tax evasion and connections to organized crime. It may also be because the industry historically developed thanks to the active contributions of ethnic minorities in Japanese society like Koreans and Chinese. Actually, pachinko business including both upstream machine-making to downstream service establishments stands as the only large industry in which the minority groups have played a predominant role in Japan.
Although the pachinko entertainment originated on the busy street of temple and shrine festivals in pre-World War II Japan, the modern development resulted from the legalization of pachinko gambling after the war. The number of pachinko places thus skyrocketed to 43, 452 in 1953 from 4, 818 establishments in 1949, although the number then rapidly declined to 8, 487 in 1957. The turbulent 1950s symbolized the decade in which the basic organization of the industry got established thanks presumably to the emergence of innovative machines and the alterations of police regulations regarding high-risk gambling.
The present article focuses on the entrepreneurial activities of Takeichi Masamura whose mechanical improvement called Masamura-gauge revolutionized the pachinko machine that became more technically sophisticated. While Masamura did not deliberately register for the patent of his invention for the sake of the overall development of the pachinko industry, his business combining the machine-making segment and the amusement establishments still flourished thanks to the strong sales of his machines and the technical know-how his company possessed as a manufacturer.
In 1955, however, police regulation got altered in order to prevent the gambling craze of pachinko, which drastically changed the performance of the industry in general. Masamura's enterprise was also hit hard as the demand for new equipment suddenly declined. His downstream pachinko amusement segment, on the other hand, could improve the profitability, because the new regulation eventually lowered the business uncertainty that had been associated to the progressively risky equipment. Given the new regulatory environment and the stabilized structure of the industry the performance of pachinko business now depended upon accumulated managerial know-how and capabilities, rather simple luck or technical skills. Principles of scale economies kicked into the industry and the average size of amusement establishments would get larger in the 1960s. The new entry thus became difficult for both machine-making and amusement segment because of the requirements for financial resources and managerial know-how.

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This paper argues historical significance of the producers' attempts to improve fish manure in the early 20^th century. In those years, there was a rapid increase of the import of manure that included not only bean oil cake and chemical fertilizer, but also fish manure. Therefore, it was considered as an issue of the industry to improve traditional fish oil cake which had been used popularly since the 18^th century.
Much of the imported fish manure was machine-made fish meal. There were two attempts to make and sell fish meal in the Japanese Empire. The one was the attempt to produce it by the Marine Products Experimental Station of Karafuto, and the other was the attempt to produce and sell it by Morosada who was one of the manure wholesalers in Nagoya.
The former was started in 1909 and used American-made machines to process raw fish into fish meal. In comparison with traditional fish oil cake, it had more of components and also got better results from experiments. But this attempt ended in failure. Because the production process needed higher fixed cost, it did not suit the small-scale fishery management in Karafuto, in which the catch of fish was drastically varied year by year. It was difficult for the fishery management in Karafuto to use the machines.
The latter was production of fish meal by breaking traditional fish oil cake into pieces. The fish meal produced with such a method was highly graded in the exhibition of manures in 1907. But Morosada had to make its price lower, facing the competition with traditional herring oil cake. The consumers of fish manure estimated the fish meal lower than Morosada had expected.
To conclude, both these attempts indicate that fish meal was not suitable for the method of production and consumption habit of fish manure at this period.

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