ABSTRACT
In 1910, the year when Japan annexed Korea, there were about seventeen thousand Japanese residents in Korea, of which about a quarter were merchants who were the proprietors of small or medium scale firms. This paper, building on earlier work I have done on Japanese merchants who were active in Pusan after the opening of that city to foreign trade in 1876, 1 will examine the background and process of the Japanese commercial advance into Korea through a careful analysis of the business diary (Ishi) of one Japanese merchant, Kameya Aisuke. This diary, written by Aisuke during his lifetime, was edited and published by Kameya’s descendants in 1979. 2 Kameya Aisuke who had gotten his start as a shop boy had a distinguished career, rising to become chairman of the Chamber of Commerce of Wonsan (see the chronological table of Kameya’s career). Kameya is a suitable subject for a volume on commercial networks, since throughout his career he made use of both ‘hard’ and ‘soft’, formal and informal networks in his business dealings. In this essay I will delineate his activities in a number of different fields, including his role as manager of a trading firm, his activities as a dealer in various goods, his involvement in finance, and the roles he played in various governmental and social activities. In all of these activities he relied on different kinds of networks. As a merchant engaged in activities that involved moving into new markets in unknown areas, networks were unusually important for Kameya.
