This paper examines the historical industrial agglomeration of the pharmaceutical trade in modern Japan with a special reference to Doshō-machi Town, a pharmaceutical district in central Osaka. Dōgyōsha-machi or historical towns with many people involved in the same trade, many of which have their origins in early modern urban planning, have rarely attracted researchers in recent decades, though they once constituted a classic topic in Japanese historical geography in the 1950s and 1960s. However, some important questions remain unexamined and uncertain: for instance, why have some dōgyōsha-machi continued to exhibit spatial agglomeration during and after the modern industrialization period?
In order to consider how a town involved in the same trade maintains concentration through recomposing itself during the rapid social and economical changes of the modern capitalist age, it is important to analyze the relationships between and the social co-ordination and customs followed by the same traders, as shown in recent developments in the economic geography of industrial agglomeration. However, the previous studies on dōgyōsha-machi have not examined the modern agglomeration of merchants who are directly involved in exchange.
The findings of this paper are summarized as below. First, the pharmaceutical industry had developed continuously since the latter half of the Meiji era (1890-1912), which is in contrast to the sudden development of the chemical industry during the Taisho era (1912-1926). At the same time, several pharmaceutical merchants sustained themselves in Doshō-machi, and the economic scales of their business tended to increase. Second, the concentration of pharmaceutical merchants was constant mainly owing to the participation of new ones, while some of the traditional merchants with early modern origins survived. The pharmaceutical industry in Osaka during the Meiji and the Taisho periods developed as a subsidiary sector of pharmaceutical wholesalers. Finally, in Doshō-machi, there were some groups of pharmaceutical merchants formed by details of their business, and the interests of those groups often conflicted with the business co-ordination for quality control of products. However, the conflicts were managed at the meetings of the association of Osaka pharmaceutical wholesalers. These findings suggest that additional geographical research on modern industrial agglomerations are needed in order to analyze the co-ordination and customs followed by merchants and manufacturers.
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