University of Pittsburgh
Shashi: the Journal of Japanese Business and Company HistoryNot a member yet
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Western Merchants and the Meiji Transition: John Henry Duus at Treaty Port Hakodate (Part Two 1868-89)
Get PDFIn the second of this two-part article I examine the business activities of John Henry Duus in the years after the Meiji Restoration. Duus was already an experienced treaty port trader by the Meiji Restoration of 1868 and from his base in Hakodate, where he also served as Danish consul, he played a role in facilitating trade between Hakodate and Chinese treaty ports. Duus’ career in Japan spanned almost three decades including the transition from Tokugawa (Edo) to Meiji—Duus died in 1889, the year the Meiji constitution was promulgated. An examination of his activities utilizing fragments of his correspondence shows the opportunities and difficulties that Western merchants had to overcome as they sought to prosper in a turbulent era. Duus should have been well-placed to take advantage of the new opportunities that Meiji modernization presented, however, as this paper shows, Meiji reform efforts often disrupted Western commercial interests
Making Japanese tea a big business: The transformation of ITO EN since the 1960s
Get PDFAlthough traditional industries are commonly dominated by numerous SMEs focused on their respective domestic markets, the Japanese tea industry experienced the emergence and rapid growth of large enterprises in the 1990s. This article analyzes the strategy that enabled such a change, focusing on the most important Japanese tea producer, ITO EN, which developed bottled green tea in 1985. Based on an approach of business history and industry studies, the article argues that the shift in the 1990s was made possible by the transformation of the true nature of the tea industry in going from a commodity business to a branded consumer-goods business
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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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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Western Merchants and Intra-Asian Trade: John Henry Duus at Treaty port Hakodate (Part One 1861-68)
Get PDFThis 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