Separation from Mitsui Mining: Kamioka Mining founded and listed in Tokyo (1950)

What it made of an independence it was handed

Read as one more scene in a dissolution ordered from above, this episode is hard to see clearly. What was cut out of Mitsui Mining was not a case for liquidation but a business that stood on its own: the Kamioka mine, with twelve hundred years of workings behind it, and the Miike, Hikoshima and Hibi smelters. Five months after its founding it was listed on the First Section of the Tokyo Stock Exchange, and by October 1951 its capital had been doubled from ¥600 million to ¥1.2 billion. That pace suggests something other than passive compliance with a policy.

Yet this independence can only be called a success because Kamioka went on being mined. The forty-million-tonne ore reserve that Vice-President Omoto Shimpei cited was, read the other way, a statement that the company’s earnings were tied to a single mine and the zinc price. The fifteen years spent widening into rolled copper and die casting and building capital up to ¥10.8 billion were, in that light, work aimed at loosening the tie. How to rebuild an independence granted by policy into a business that did not depend on one asset — that long task began on the day of the separation.