Founding DOWA — the transfer of the state-run Kosaka mine, and rebirth through black-ore smelting (1884)

How a supplier to the state became a mining company

What this founding shows is a firm that took over an existing state asset and found its fate decided by whether it could get past the technical wall buried in it. Fujita-gumi acquired Kosaka on capital accumulated through Choshu connections and government contracts, yet was ordered at one point to close the mine, defeated by the problem of smelting black ore. That it kept the mine rather than surrendering it appears to be the result of factors outside capital altogether: Kuhara Fusanosuke’s engineering and Inoue Kaoru’s patronage.

The other thing that emerges is the company’s own sense of where it began — not with the Fujita-gumi trading house of 1869 but with the 1884 transfer of Kosaka. A supplier of military boots and uniforms to the state took on a mine of uncertain economics, established a smelting process, and raised it into the largest copper-producing ground in the country; DOWA Holdings reads that passage as its starting point as a mining company. Through the successive turns of the age — Choshu networks, the disposal of state enterprises, self-fluxing black-ore smelting, wartime control — the mining arm of Fujita-gumi became an independent public company.