Soyeda Juichi

Soeda Juichi in the USA, June 1913

Soyeda Juichi ( Japanese 添 田 壽 一 ; born September 15, 1864 ( traditionally : Genji 1/8/15) in Fukuoka Prefecture ; † July 4, 1929 ), also reformed Soeda , was a Japanese economist, ministerial tax officer and state banker of the late Meiji and Taishō periods .

Life path

Soeda Juichi was born as the third son of the village chief Soeda Shinzaburō. The family moved first to Osaka in 1870 , then Kyoto and Tokyo . He had three daughters.

The sale of the boy's beautiful calligraphy soon added to the family income. The son of the former daimyo of Fukuoka attended the Imperial University of Tokyo from 1880 . Kuroda, who had become a marquis, also financed the studies of the young Soeda, who was already enrolled at the foreign language school.

After graduating in economics in 1884, Soeda was briefly an official in the Ministry of Finance . The young Kuroda was sent to King's College at Cambridge University . Soeda was appointed as a companion and was allowed to participate in the lectures as a non-collegiate student. He studied under Henry Sidgwick (1838-1900) and Alfred Marshall (1842-1924). Until he graduated in folk and political science in 1887, he also attended courses at Heidelberg University .

Ministry of Finance

After returning to Japan, Soeda resumed his career in the Treasury. He collaborated on Finance Minister Matsukata Masayoshi's drafts for the modern banking law that brought inflation under control.

After the boxer's compensation had been paid to the London branch of the Yokohama Specie Bank , there was enough money available to permanently restructure the state finances. The finance minister Watanabe Kunitake , whose private secretary Soeda was meanwhile, was able to enforce the laws on the gold standard (implemented 1897-99) against the parliamentary opposition, which wanted bimetallism , through his advice .

Soeda played a leading role in drafting the laws on the Nihon Kangyō Ginko mortgage bank in 1896 and the Nihon Kōgyō Ginko industrial bank .

Within the Ministry, he became State Secretary and then Director of the Internal Control Department. In the first cabinet of Ōkuma Shigenobu he was one of the vice ministers.

Bank of Taiwan

Since the law establishing the Taiwan Ginkō was passed in March 1897 , Soeda headed the organizing committee. When the institute, capitalized with two million silver yen and one million state interest-free credit, started operations in March 1899, he became the first president until November 25, 1901. The Taiwan Ginkō functioned essentially as the central bank with banknote privilege for the Japanese island since 1895 , but also had normal branches in Kobe and in the Chinese and Manchurian regions. At the end of the 1900 financial year, an 8% dividend was paid. Almost 5 million deposits contrasted with: loans to private individuals amounting to 1.4 million, 6.2 million to the colonial administration and issued banknotes for 36.7 million.

Nihon Kōgyō Ginkō industrial bank

Headquarters of Nihon Kōgyō Ginkō (1950s)

The purpose of the Nihon Kōgyō Ginkō was to establish a connection between the central bank, which was prohibited from normal banking, and large-scale industry. At a time when the Japanese domestic bond market did not yet exist, the bank organized the successful placement of municipal and South Manchurian Railways bonds on the London Stock Exchange valued at £ 27.176 million. This practice had the added benefit that the gold raised went to the Japanese currency reserve, but the cities could be paid out in paper money.

Soeda resigned as president on February 1, 1913, officially for health reasons, in fact probably because some large 4% loans to mining companies were lazy. His successor in office Shidachi Tetsujirō (1868-1948) was able to reorganize these companies.

French-Japanese Bank

By founding Banque Franco-Japonaise in 1912, which Soeda helped to initiate, Japanese financial circles tried to gain greater influence in Indochina. In the end, however, it could not prevail against the Banque de l'Indochine .

After 1913

Immediately after his resignation as bank president, Soeda went to California in May, where he was a lobbyist against the planned immigration restrictions for Japanese people. In the following years he worked closely with the most active Japanese businessman of the time Shibusawa Eiichi (1840–1931). Soeda's commitment to the moderate Yūaikai union from 1916 onwards is probably due to this connection . Soeda, however, stood for a paternalistic relationship between labor and capital, in keeping with Confucian morality.

From September 1915 he was head of the railway office that controlled the imperial railway . He had to give up this post when the second Ōkuma cabinet fell in October 1916. He heads the organizing committee, which was supposed to establish a Japanese-Indian bank, but then remained unsuccessful. Soeda was also a lecturer at his former university and several smaller colleges. He was appointed president of various companies, such as the Chugai Shōgyō Shinpōsha and Hōchi Shinbun-sha. He was a member of the steering committee of the Tokyo Chamber of Commerce, at times its honorary president. Since 1919 was again in the committee for the preparation of the census. From July 1920 he was also an appointed advisory member of the Committee on Legislative Initiatives. In 1921 he traveled again to the USA.

The Taiwan Ginkō got into increasing difficulties after the 1923 earthquake . On September 1, 1926, Soeda was appointed as the bank's additional external auditor. In this position, which he retained until his death, he also overlooked the reorganization measures of the institute, which collapsed in April 1927. The collapse led directly to the dismissal of the first Wakatsuki cabinet and to the Shōwa financial crisis , as a result of which the number of Japanese commercial banks fell from over 1,800 to 465 in the medium term.

Honors

• March 1899: Doctor of Law ( hōgaku hakushi ) from the University of Tokyo
• After the end of his tenure as Vice Minister he received the Order of the Rising Sun , 4th grade.
• For his time at the head of the state railroad, he was awarded the Order of the Holy Treasure , 1st class.
• The appointment to the fourth upper court rank when he left the civil service in 1916, included membership in the upper house as an imperial appointee.

Fonts

Soeda wrote numerous economic papers, many of them in English. For almost three decades he was a Japanese correspondent for the Economic Journal .

literature

• Olive Checkland: Juichi Soyeda, 1864–1929: A Checkered banking Career , in: Pacific Banking, 1859–1959 . Houndsmill 1994, ISBN 0-333-62600-1
• KR Iseki (Ed.): Who's Who Hakushi in Japan . Tokyo [approx. 1921], p. 28 f.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Watanabe and Matsukata alternated several times in office from 1885–98.
2. ↑ Start-up capital 10 million yen , of which only a quarter was paid up. Another quarter was paid up in 1905, and a loan in London the following year raised another quarter (£ 770,000).
3. ↑ The switch to the gold standard for Taiwan did not take place until 1904.
4. ↑ 日本 興業 銀行 Merged in 2002 with Daiichi Kangyō Ginkō and Fuji Ginkō to form Mizuho Financial Group .
5. ↑ Japanese cities also issued loans in Paris: Kyoto 1909 45 million francs, Tokyo 1912 101 million Pacific Banking, (1994), p. 69
6. ↑ See that which he co-authored: A Survey of the Japanese Question in California; San Francisco 1913. In the end, he could not prevent the California Alien Land Law of 1913 .
7. ↑ Stephen S. Large; The Japanese Labor Movement, 1912-1919: Suzuki Bunji and the Yuaikai; Journal of Asian Studies, Vol. 29, No. 3. (May, 1970), pp. 559-579

Japanese name: As is common in Japan, the family name comes before the first name in this article . Thus Soyeda surname, Juichi the first name.