Hokkaido Kono Kosha: consolidating the federation with Morinaga, Meiji and Kyokuto (1941)

Between state policy and co-operation

The founding of Hokkaido Kono Kosha was a grand consolidation of the dairy industry carried out under wartime control and national policy. Ending the inefficiency of the federation and three condensed-milk companies competing inside a narrow Hokkaido, as part of a comprehensive development plan for the land — that framework was itself a product of control from above. Yet Kurosawa Torizo, who stood at its centre, tried to carry into the new company the co-operative ideal of not putting profit first and of not treating employees as hired hands. The ambiguity of the merger lies exactly there: the efficiency demanded by state policy and the co-operative thinking the farmers had raised were being made to meet inside a single company.

The company that bound those different origins together did not, however, survive in that form. The two colours within it — the profit-seeking lineage of the condensed-milk firms and the federation’s inheritance from the co-operative movement — would be questioned anew in the postwar reordering of the economy. The vast dairy organization unified under state policy soon found itself facing demolition as a target of deconcentration. How far the co-operative ideal, entrusted to the language of “developmental dissolution,” was in fact carried across the era of control is a question the founding of Kono Kosha leaves open behind it.