The Takedate Cooperative is a well-known agricultural cooperative in Japan. This study examines the Takedate Cooperative’s credit activities from 1907 until the 1930s. Established in the backward agricultural areas of northeast Japan, in the Aomori prefecture, this cooperative supported members’ production activities, introduced standardization and trademarking in the apple trade, and created the “Takedate Apple” brand. Since its inception, the cooperative has included purchase, marketing, and production divisions, and in 1914, it introduced a credit division to help its members overcome difficulties in raising money from the financial market after poor rice harvests. An additional aim of Takedate Cooperative was to dominate its member behavior by providing preferential financing terms to frequent users of its production and marketing activities and to members who obeyed to its rules. Before World War I, the cooperative raised finances through individual member deposits, and lent considerable sums of money at low rates to its members for cultivation. This lending practice allowed cooperative members to grow apples as well as rice until the early 1920s. However, in the wake of poor business conditions after World War I and the consequent lower than normal performance of its marketing division, the cooperative was forced to reduce loan amounts and lent money to cover living expenses only. It even urged members to save money. Given the circumstances, the cooperative’s loan rate eventually exceeded that of the Aomori prefecture’s financial market, leading many competent members to withdraw their memberships. However, this action did not result in the stagnation of the cooperative and its surrounding areas. On the contrary, in Takedate village, the core area of the cooperative, peasants could still borrow money and purchase land without pledging security. Thus, 80% of farm households could continue to grow apples, leading to greater affluence in the 1930s.

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The goal of this paper is to show the role technologies used in silk manufacturing played in the development of high quality silk production.
In 1878, Kichiroji Tase and his family began producing raw silk through mechanical means in order to improve quality, but the early stages involved a great amount of trial and error, and they were unable to produce silk of very high quality at first.
However, the Tase family continued working into the 1890s, aiming to increase production gradually, and eventually were able to produce high-quality raw silk. This improvement in quality was due to a number of factors which included improving the silk production equipment, carefully selecting the cocoons used as raw material, and mastering the processes involved in boiling and reeling the silk. At this stage however, the “sunk reeling” process which required separate boiling and reeling steps had not yet been brought into full use, so while quality had increased, production could not yet be expanded.
The “sunk reeling” process was fully established as a part of production after the dissolution of the silk manufacturing association in the 1900s, and efficiency increased. The family had created a system enabling large-scale production of high-quality raw silk, and they were able to further tighten factory management policies in the hopes of increasing operational efficiency. It was at this point that operational differences between the Tase family’s silk company and the Suwa silk industry essentially disappeared.
After developing their own raw silk production methods, the Tase family had to begin competing with the large-scale silk producers in the market for high-quality silks, and during this period the Tase family increased production of silk thread for textiles and opened a branch factory in order to expand their operations.

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