One bank per prefecture: merging four Fukuoka banks into one (1945)

A franchise dealt by policy, and its tenth year

To describe this as a merger that merely obeyed wartime control is to lose what the combination actually contained. The one-bank-per-prefecture policy ordered that the banks of a prefecture become one; it did not specify which franchises would be brought to the table. To the Seventeenth Bank, which handled the commercial finance of the city of Fukuoka, were added Kaho Bank, backed by the colliery capital of Chikuho; Chikuho Bank, which had bundled eighteen banks in the south of the prefecture; and the only savings bank in Fukuoka. Nearly the whole industrial composition of Fukuoka Prefecture was gathered into a single institution. That it stood first among all regional banks in Japan by deposits at its founding was the sum of that arithmetic.

A franchise dealt out by policy, however, does not also take on the changes in industry. When coal declined in the energy revolution the business stalled; in July 1953 came what is called the first strike in the history of Japanese banking, and the bank stepped down from first place among regional banks. The scale won by merger also meant carrying the rise and fall of the prefecture’s industries whole. What was tested — how to use a position that had been given — came not in 1945, when four banks became one, but ten years later.