A branch on transferred concession land in Tianjin, and expansion into Hankou, Keijo and Manchuria (1903)

Inside a framework the state had prepared

In place of an installment-finance business that had stopped growing at home in the recession, what this company obtained was 37,838 tsubo of concession land transferred to it by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. It can be read not as opening a market under its own power but as carrying its existing business — build housing and offices, then rent them — straight into a framework the government had prepared. That by the late 1930s it had grown to own most of the prime land inside the concession was also because that framework lasted for more than forty years.

The framework was not something the company’s own efforts could protect. When the Tianjin branch was abolished in August 1945, its overseas assets vanished — together with roughly 40% of all the land and 77% of all the buildings it owned. A business that rests its earnings pillar on the same foundation as national foreign policy loses an equivalent amount on the day that policy collapses. Given that it walked to its 1949 relisting on domestic assets alone, the forty-odd years accumulated abroad were almost entirely non-transferable as corporate assets.