Assigned to the Nippon Yusen group by the shipping consolidation (1964)

Not that it could not choose, but that the choices were few

The 1964 consolidation was a restructuring whose frame was set by statute and confirmed by the ministry. A mid-sized shipping company had, in practice, no freedom to decide whether to take part; what remained to be judged was which core company’s umbrella to stand under, and at what level of the hierarchy. That Shinwa Kaiun secured the position of an affiliated company in the NYK group meant that it did not fall to being a captive owner that merely chartered its ships out, but kept a business as an operator. Even inside a process of being folded into a policy structure, judgement was still at work on how much of the company’s own outline could be preserved.

That choice, however, also fixed a relationship in which its cargo and its capital belonged to different keiretsu. Earning on long-term contracts for steel while NYK sat at the top of the shareholder register — this duality is likely to have left areas, in fleet expansion and route selection, that the company could not decide alone. Only in 2010, when Nippon Steel became the largest shareholder, was the duality resolved into a single line. As a case in which a structure created by policy governed the shape of a company for nearly half a century, this decision is worth reading again.