Individual Paper
2. From Oceanic Crossroads: Empires, Networks and Histories
Ever since the founding of the first Chamber of Commerce of Japan in Tokyo in 1878 and subsequently in all major Japanese cities, these local business associations engaged in intensifying the gathering of economic and political information to advance trade opportunities with regions outside of Japan. As such, especially the Chambers located in port cities became hubs for Japan’s Empire building since the 1890s and began a gradually intensifying collaboration with the Japanese state, above all with its ministerial bureaucracy in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Ministry of Agriculture and Commerce but also with the Army and Navy Ministries.
Using hitherto unused documents from the Tokyo, Osaka, and Otaru Chambers of Commerce, it will be argued that the Chamber’s increasing entanglement with Japan’s imperial project throughout the Asia-Pacific region is an under-researched factor in the history of the rapid growth of the Japanese Empire and of its geopolitical and economic reach. In particular the growing information networks since the First World War, often employing refined statistics, between the Chambers, with Japanese communities throughout the entire region, and with state as with academic institutions throughout the Empire became a vital factor in this expansion. It will be further argued that the dormant networks of the Chambers played a crucial role in the aftermath of the collapse of the Japanese Empire in 1945 in the reinvention of Japan as a global economic power in congruence with US geopolitical power.
Jan Schmidt
KU Leuven Faculty of Arts, Belgium