Published papers

This study quantitatively investigates daily rice prices in Osaka’s futures and spot markets from 1925 to 1939 to examine how the futures market served as the index price of the spot trade under the government’s frequent interventions. The functions of the futures market fundamentally varied with seasons in response to the rice harvest. After the Great Depression, the government extended its manipulations to control rice prices, and its interventions greatly reduced the futures market’s role at times other than during the harvest season. Consequently, the unstable futures market functionally swung in the 1930s.

This paper aims to elucidate the function of commodity exchanges in index price formation on the spot market during the later Meiji era in Japan. In particular, this paper focuses the function of periodical salt transactions (trading in futures) from October, 1894 to May, 1905 on the Tokyo Commodity Exchange. Historical studies of commodity or stock exchanges in Japan have tended to focus on the Dojima (Osaka) Rice Exchange in the Tokugawa period and historians have paid little attention to commodity exchanges from the Meiji era onward. However, the beginning of transactions in commodities other than rice on the exchanges after the enactment of the Exchange Law in 1893 was one of the important characteristics of 1890s when the base formation of the modern market progressed. Accordingly, hoping to contribute to a better understanding of the process by which the commodity exchange system was established as a general trading system with the rise of capitalism in Japan, I consider periodical transactions on the exchange around the early twentieth century. This paper shows that index price formation function of the Tokyo Commodity Exchange had two limitations. Firstly, periodical transaction price functioned only as an index price of Shinsaida-shio (low-grade salt made in the Seto Inland Sea of Japan) price. In other words, periodical transaction price did not function as an index price of any other salt. Secondly, the function of the Tokyo Commodity Exchange was diachronically unstable especially after around 1900 when salt consumers began to buy more imported than domestic salt. The Tokyo Commodity Exchange was one of the largest commodity exchanges and the center of salt periodical transactions in Japan. We can say therefore, during the later Meiji era, if a trader in the market had used periodical transactions on the commodity exchange to hedge against the risk of price changes, the trader could not have been able to hedge in many cases. Even if traders succeeded in hedging in the short term, they could not use the commodity exchange to hedge stably in the long term.

This paper examines the causes of the increase in salt imports to the home islands of Japan from the leased territory of Kwantung, in the Liaodong Peninsula, after the Russo-Japanese War. First, we analyze how the Japanese government failed to negotiate the Agreement on Export of Salt from Kwantung to China. Subsequently, we examine the process that led to the growth in salt imports from Kwantung to the home islands of Japan after the failure of the trade negotiations. This paper shows that both the Governor-General of Kwantung and the Dongsan Province were willing to impose a tax on the exports of salt from Kwantung to increase their own tax revenues. However, the Governor-General of Kwantung did not allow the Dongsan Province to impose a tax on the salt exports to the foreign countries, including the home islands of Japan. The introduction of such tax would have increased the price of salt from Kwantung in the foreign markets, causing a contraction in salt exports and a subsequent reduction of the salt tax revenues for Kwantung. However, the episode led to a breakdown in the negotiations. After that, the Ministry of Finance in Japan designated Kwantung as the supply center of salt under the salt monopoly, introducing a regime intended to increase tax revenues. The production cost of salt in Kwantung was lower than in the home islands of Japan: even if both the home government and the Governor-General of Kwantung imposed taxes on salt trade, the salt from Kwantung was still cheaper than domestic salt. Thus, the Japanese government promoted imports from Kwantung to increase tax revenues of both the home government and the Governor-General of Kwantung. Studies of the history of colonial trade in pre-war Japan have argued that the Japanese government promoted colonial trade expansion to reduce the outflow of specie money under the gold standard system. In contrast, we suggest that the government may have promoted colonial trade expansion to increase its tax revenue. Towards the turn of the twentieth century, Japan's fiscal condition was aggravated by the expansion of its colonies. The Japanese government promoted stronger interdependency between the home islands and the colonial economies to improve its public finance by imposing double taxation. Thus, the deteriorating fiscal conditions following the Japanese colonial expansion promoted the growth of colonial trade in Japan.

© Economic History Society 2017 This article studies the interrelation between spot and futures prices in the two major rice markets in prewar Japan from the perspective of market efficiency. Applying a non-Bayesian time-varying model approach to the fundamental equation for spot returns and the futures premium, we detect when efficiency reductions in the two major rice markets occurred. We also examine how government interventions affected the rice markets in Japan, which colonized Taiwan and Korea before the Second World War, and argue that the function of rice futures markets crucially depended on the differences in the structure of rice spot markets. Initially the increased volume of imported rice of a different variety from domestic rice disrupted the rice futures markets. Then, government intervention in the rice futures markets failed to improve the disruption. Changes in colonial rice cropping successfully mitigated the disruption, and colonial rice was promoted in order to unify the different varieties of inland and colonial rice.