Nearly two years before the Hyōgo Shōsha, in the eighth month of 1865, a “memorandum of enquiry on the organization of a trading company” was submitted to the shogunate's councillors in the name of Oguri Kōzukenosuke, commissioner of finance. Japan and France were each to found a great company, and the two were to be joined directly in trade — the plan later called the “Franco-Japanese joint-company scheme”. It was never carried out, but where the idea began and the scale of it are necessary to understanding the Hyōgo Shōsha.
What came before: the Kokueki Kaisho
The starting point goes back to 1861, the year after he came home from the embassy to the United States. Since the opening of the ports in 1859 the export of raw silk, tea and marine products had grown enormously, but the profit was all but monopolized by foreign merchants. The foreign merchants first drew the thinly capitalized Japanese merchants, the “Yokohama consignment merchants” among them, with high prices, and then, once the goods were gathered at Yokohama, held off from buying. The Japanese merchants, in difficulty, sold at a loss. In time the foreign merchants began to make them advances, and the Japanese merchants became wholly dependent. Even Alcock, the British minister, lamented how outrageously his own country's merchants behaved.
What Oguri set up to stop this head on was his Kokueki Kaisho, a national profit exchange. It had four pillars: exchanges at Edo and Osaka, managing in one hand the goods going in and out; one merchant for each article, to sit at the exchange as “representative promoter”; a bidding floor for each article, where buyers would be gathered to bid; and loans to the producers in the growing districts.
But this would at a stroke take away the privilege of “free trading by foreigners” at the open ports. The foreign merchants, learning of the plan, mounted a furious campaign against it, and complaints came through diplomatic channels. To force it through would make a serious diplomatic matter. Oguri had to give up carrying the plan out in full.
What the Franco-Japanese joint-company scheme contained
What came next along the same line was the Franco-Japanese joint-company scheme. The British got wind of the plan first. In the second month of 1865 the English-language The London China Express reported that France had a plan to set up a trading company for trade with Japan. On the ninth day of the second month of that same year the British and Dutch ministers asked for an interview with the senior councillor Mizuno Tadakiyo and the junior councillor Sakai Tadamasu, and demanded sharply to know whether it was true, as they had heard, that there was a plan to export raw silk in bulk to a single market in Europe in order to buy ships and arms. The councillors turned it aside, saying that which country Japan contracted with was for the Japanese government to decide, and that it was only natural to meet the payment out of the country's surplus produce.
In the eighth month of 1865 the memorandum was submitted. It opens as follows.
“Lately, when Kōzukenosuke was at Yokohama on official business, the French minister proposed that a joint-company arrangement be set up …”
Its substance was to put a stop to the smuggling then rife, to take back into Japanese hands the profit of a trade monopolized by foreign merchants, and to found one great trading company in order to put the management of trade and the business of the customs in order. In particular, Japan was to found a “great company of commerce and navigation” and station its representative in Paris, while the representative of a French “company of export and import” was to be placed at Yokohama, the two buying and selling goods according to the rates of the moment. The capital was to be put up by the merchants of each country. The man who worked for this plan on the French side was Fleury Hérard, a great banker of Paris.
It is also known that what began as a “trade association” in which the merchants of both countries were to take part together changed by degrees into the form in which each country founded a great company and the two dealt with each other. The shogunate's instruction on this memorandum has not been found to this day.
In the following year, 1866, a man named Coullet came to Yokohama as the representative of French business. Oguri negotiated with him and reached a conclusion, and the minister Roches recorded in a report dated 31 October 1866 (the twenty-third day of the ninth month by the Japanese calendar) that Oguri had gone to Osaka to show the shogun the draft contract with Coullet, and that the plan for founding a great Japanese company of commerce and transport to deal with a French company was to be explained to the Taikun. No source giving the particulars of the plan as shown to the shogun has been found.
The “secret” told to Katsu Kaishū
In the fifth month of 1866, in the middle of the second expedition against Chōshū, Katsu Kaishū was reappointed commissioner of warships and ordered to Osaka. The day before he left, Oguri called on him and told him of this plan. Katsu wrote of it years later in Hikawa Seiwa.
“Oguri said to me privately that my going up to the west this time must be on business to do with the negotiations over Chōshū. If so, he said, we in fact have such a plan as this, and you will no doubt agree with it; therefore I venture to tell you this secret.”
On the spot Katsu said nothing against it — he “only assented” — but on reaching Osaka he launched a furious attack on Oguri before the senior councillors. By this stage the story had turned into one in which Oguri was trying to borrow money from France “on the security of Japan's own territory”. Kaishū Nisshi has it: “the treasure of the country being spent to nothing, he pledges the land and borrows … money from France”.
This talk of “security” was widely believed through the Meiji, Taishō and Shōwa eras. Research such as Ōtsuka Takematsu's Bakumatsu Gaikōshi no Kenkyū (studies in the diplomatic history of the shogunate's last years), of the Historiographical Institute of the University of Tokyo, has made clear that, at least as far as Oguri's negotiation goes, there was no talk of security at all, and no secret agreement either. At the stage of the summer of 1866 there is no mortgage whatever in the loan contract between Oguri and Coullet. The loan negotiations were moreover conducted evenly with Britain and France, six million dollars each, and of the French six million, one million was to come from the Oriental Bank of Britain and five million jointly from the Société Générale of France and the Oriental Bank.
Where the plan went
His great plan to join with foreign capital having received no instruction at all, Oguri set up the Hyōgo Shōsha in 1867 on the capital of merchants at home. To borrow foreign strength, or to complete the thing within Japan: moving between these two, the shogunate's management of its finances came to its last phase.
Ironically, the first man to carry the plan of the Kokueki Kaisho out on a national scale was Mitsuoka Hachirō (Yuri Kimimasa), who came to hold the imperial army's finances on Sakamoto Ryōma's recommendation. Yuri's method provoked the foreign trading houses, and Ōkuma Shigenobu, on the receiving end of their protests, turned this to his own use to drive Yuri out and took the real power in the finance ministry himself. Even so, the finance of Matsukata Masayoshi, who became minister of finance in 1881, is held to have carried on Yuri's method at root; and trace that further back, and the origin of Meiji fiscal policy lies in Oguri's plan.
At about the same time Oguri was pressing forward another large plan that leaned on foreign capital. → The six-million-dollar loan that never was
Source: Sakamoto Fujiyoshi, “Hyōgo Shōsha” o Tsukutta Saigo no Bakushin: Oguri Kōzukenosuke no Shōgai (the last shogunal official, the man who created the Hyōgo Shōsha: the life of Oguri Kōzukenosuke), Kōdansha, 1987