ABSTRACT
The zaikai offers a more conventional model of a private sector within the prewar political economy of Japan, and a clearer foil of contract to covenant, of officials and citizen or kwanmin to kunsin, and of engagement rather than isolation from regional markets. An unfair competition with the zaikai made the patterns feasible and far more palatable to Korean brokers than political coercion. A crisis confronting both chaegye and zaikai at Inch'on in the 1920s introduces contention among mercantile interests in an emerging civil society. A profile of zaikai enterprise and association at the port helps explain both opposition and advocacy for the proposal. Enterprise offers a profile of capital and assets, but association tells us more of ideas among the business community. An infrastructure of peak and trade specific interest associations permitted rapid mobilization of the colonial zaikai at Inch'on where a chamber of commerce was in place almost two decades prior to annexation.
