Absorbing fourteen gas companies and taking on all of Kinki (1945)

When a passive merger recovered its meaning

To file the fourteen-company merger away as mere compliance with wartime control is to lose sight of what followed. Even granting that the consolidation moved with the state's programme for combining firms, the result — city-gas supply across the six prefectures of Kinki gathered into a single company — was not a small thing. The structure that unified the scattered supply obligations of Kobe Gas, Kyoto Gas and the rest became the skeleton of the region's post-war energy base.

That said, one cannot claim Osaka Gas actively chose this unification. The merger proceeded in the year the war ended, inside a national policy of consolidation, and supply immediately afterwards — caught between material shortages and reconstruction demand — was anything but stable. Yet once the network had been bound into one company, a single operator could plan and carry out infrastructure renewal on a six-prefecture scale, as the natural-gas conversion later would. A consolidation that began passively took a long time to recover its meaning; this is one example of it.