In the fourth month of 1867 Oguri proposed the founding of the Hyōgo Shōsha. The proposal was titled “A memorandum on the opening of the port of Hyōgo, on the founding of a trading company, and on the prospect for the funds required”. In that same fourth month of 1867, Sakamoto Ryōma of Tosa organized the Kaientai. From the shogunate's side and from the side against it, bodies built on “organized capital” came into being in exactly the same month.
The word “konpenī”
In the proposal Oguri laments the state of things in which foreign merchants, by advancing capital, had a hold even on the producing districts.
This may appear to be no more than the loss of individual merchants … but it becomes the loss of our country; in the end the rights of the whole nation are lost, we are held in contempt by the foreign merchants, and we give the merchants of the West their ground for making money in the East. It is truly a matter for lamentation.
What Oguri named against this was a company on large capital. The proposal says: “unless we proceed on the method of a trading company — a konpenī — for foreign commerce, there will be no great trade and no profit to our country.” Sakamoto Fujiyoshi holds that this is probably the first appearance of the word “konpenī” in a Japanese official document, and notes that Mutsu Munemitsu of the Kaientai used the same word a little after Oguri. At that time the word meant not simply a “company” but an organization combining trade and finance.
The proposal goes further and suggests using the company's profits to set up gas lamps and a post office. Tokugawa Yoshinobu Kō Den includes the laying of a railway in its account, but the proposal itself goes no further than the gas lamps and the post office.
The shock felt by the Kaientai and by Satsuma
On the fifth day of the sixth month of 1867 the Hyōgo Shōsha was formally founded. This seemingly quiet event gave a great shock to the side against the shogunate. Sakamoto Fujiyoshi reads the size of that shock in the fact that the Kaientai Nisshi, which records only matters of particular importance, writes the founding of the Hyōgo Shōsha up at length.
Satsuma's movements were violent too. Godai Tomoatsu and others sought to answer the Hyōgo Shōsha by founding a “Satsuma company”, and Saigō Takamori urged on the British minister Parkes that the Hyōgo Shōsha would cost Britain its profit from trade. Egged on, Parkes shouted down a senior councillor in the most overbearing manner and opposed the Hyōgo Shōsha.
By the result, though, neither the reorganizing of the Kaientai nor the plan for a Satsuma company went forward, and only the Hyōgo Shōsha advanced steadily. On the fourteenth day of the sixth month the wealthy merchants of Osaka were gathered and Kanō Jirōsaku, speaking for Oguri, made a speech urging them to invest. The principle set out there was: “the intention is that samurai, townsman and peasant without distinction shall be admitted to this company with whatever money they have to spare, and the profits shall be distributed in proportion to the sum invested”. Repayment was allowed as well, where an investor had sudden need of money. Calling for investment regardless of rank and paying dividends in proportion to the sum invested came quite close to the requirements of a joint-stock company.
Officers were added in turn. On the sixth day of the ninth month Ōmayu Gohei of Tennōjiya in Osaka became an assistant head and six men including Kōnoikeya Shinjūrō, Tennōjiya Chūbei and Sumitomo Kichizaemon became assistant stewards; and in the tenth month Kitakaze Sōemon of Hyōgo joined as a promoter. The office was called the Shōsha Kaisho and was placed at Nakanoshima in Osaka.
What became of the two bodies
Ryōma fell to an assassin's blade with Nakaoka Shintarō on the fifteenth day of the eleventh month of 1867. He was thirty-three. The Hyōgo Shōsha did not last long either. Hyōgo opened on the seventh day of the twelfth month, but the shogunate's army was routed at Toba-Fushimi in the first month of 1868, and business after the opening lasted a bare twenty days. From founding to dissolution was about half a year. What it had to show for that half-year was the management of seven thousand koku of rice and more than 13,983 ryō in cash for preparing the opening of the port, the management of 52,150 ryō in opening costs advanced by the officers, and the issue of the gold notes. The notes were made in six kinds — a hundred ryō, fifty ryō, ten ryō, one ryō, two bu and one bu — to a total of 100,000 ryō, and the first 10,000 ryō were issued on the twenty-second day of the eleventh month.
Sakamoto Fujiyoshi sees two lines of descent in the history of how the joint-stock company arose in Japan: Oguri's Hyōgo Shōsha and Ryōma's Kaientai. At the head of Ryōma's line stands John Manjirō, who passed on knowledge of America to Ryōma through Kawada Shōryō, a man of letters of Tosa. That knowledge led on to the Kameyama Shachū, the Kaientai, and the “Bakan company” planned with Godai and others.
Sakamoto does not, however, set the two side by side as equals. Ryōma knew of the joint-stock company and yet died without taking it fully into his own trading work, he writes. Had he lived a few months longer he might have reorganized the Kaientai into a joint-stock company with Mutsu Munemitsu as his staff officer, or founded a new company on “ten thousand ryō of capital” with Godai and the rest and brought a “Kaientai of the world” into being — so he regrets; and he then places the Hyōgo Shōsha as “one of the early joint-stock companies, or the prototype of the joint-stock company in Japan”, with the Kaientai to be set against it.
The plan of the Hyōgo Shōsha did not vanish with the shogunate. After 1868 it was carried on by Minomura Rizaemon and Shibusawa Eiichi into the “trading company” and the “exchange company”. The former dealt in trade and the latter in finance, so that the two sides of the “konpenī” each took form.
And Iwasaki Yatarō, who ran the Kaientai with Ryōma and later founded Mitsubishi, studied in Edo at the school of Asaka Gonsai — which stood inside the Oguri residence. That men of opposing camps should pass through the same place where one least expects it is part of what makes the period interesting.
Sources: Sakamoto Fujiyoshi, Oguri Kōzukenosuke no Shōgai (the life of Oguri Kōzukenosuke), Kōdansha, 1987; Kanno Watarō, Nihon Kaisha Kigyō Hasseishi no Kenkyū (a study of the rise of company enterprise in Japan), Iwanami Shoten; Shibusawa Eiichi, Tokugawa Yoshinobu Kō Den (the life of Lord Tokugawa Yoshinobu)
→ The Hyōgo Shōsha — the first joint-stock company in Japan