The Shibusawa Eiichi Denki Shiryo

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Index of the Mitsui Mi’ike Mine Archive

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Jürgen Melzer, Wings for the Rising Sun: A Transnational History of Japanese Aviation. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2020. xxvi, 339 pp. ISBN 9780674244429

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Steven Ericson. Financial Stabilization in Meiji Japan: The Impact of the Matsukata Reform. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2019. x + 198 pp. $49.95 (cloth), ISBN 978-1-5017-4691-8.

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Timon Screech. The Shogun’s Silver Telescope: God, Art and Money in the English Quest for Japan. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020. 336 pp. ISBN 978-0198832034

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Western Merchants and Intra-Asian Trade: John Henry Duus at Treaty port Hakodate (Part One 1861-68)

This article examines the business activities of John Henry Duus, a long-standing foreign resident of the treaty port of Hakodate. In the first of this two-part article, I trace Duus’ background and focus in on his efforts to conduct business at Hakodate in the 1860s. Though Duus’ efforts to foster trade between Japan and western countries proved largely fruitless, he played an important role as a local agent for Chinese and China-based western firms and thus was active in fostering intra-Asian trade. As an Asia-born Anglo-Dane who first came to Hakodate as a British merchant but later switched allegiances to Denmark and served as Danish consul, Duus’ career also points to the cosmopolitan background of western treaty porters at the more peripheral treaty ports such as Hakodate.

The Wealth of Zaibatsu Owner Families: The Impact of Zaibatsu Busting in Occupied Japan

Contrary to widely accepted views, the former zaibatsu owner families, despite the drastic reduction in their enormous wealth, emerged from the U.S. Occupation with relatively sizable assets. The Holding Company Liquidation Commission, the Japanese agency that at the direction of Occupation Headquarters (GHQ) seized stocks that the zaibatsu families had held either directly or through their holding companies, worked to protect the families, especially by convincing GHQ to switch compensation from nonnegotiable bonds to cash. Furthermore, in the sale of stocks, the policy of giving purchase priority to zaibatsu company employees appears to have made it possible in some cases for the families to buy back shares and regain control over their former enterprises after 1952. As it turned out, the confiscatory measure was not so much the appropriation of the families’ assets under the GHQ-mandated dissolution of the combines as it was the Japanese government’s own punitive capital levy.

From The Editor’s Desk-Post-Pandemic Edition

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A Career of Japan: Baron Raimund von Stillfried and Early Yokohama Photography. Gartlan, Luke. Leiden–Boston: Brill, 2016. xii + 371 pp. ISBN 978-9-0042-8932-1

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Shashi Related to the Japanese Company Histories Interest Group Panel at AAS 2016

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