Modern Japanese History Workshop, August 5th, 6-8pm - "Invisible Empires: Preliminary Notes on Japanese Shipping in the 1930s"

Tyler Walker Discussion

Dear Colleagues,

Please join us for the next meeting of the Modern Japanese History Workshop next week, on Friday, August 5th, from 6-8pm, at Waseda University. This month Elijah Greenstein will present his work on Japanese shipping in the 1930s.
 
We meet in room 817, building 22, on Waseda’s main campus. The workshop is open to all, and you can find directions on our Google group site.
 
Best,
 
Tyler
 

Invisible Empires: Preliminary Notes on Japanese Shipping in the 1930s

Elijah Greenstein, PhD Candidate, Department of East Asian Studies, Princeton University

On July 1, 1937, seven of Japan’s largest shipping companies formed the Shipping Autonomous Alliance to institute “voluntary control” over maritime enterprise and thereby ensure fair shipping operations in the face of imperial crisis. The timing was fortuitous: six days later Japanese and Chinese military forces exchanged fire outside of Beijing, and with the onset of the Second Sino-Japanese War, the Shipping Alliance served as the initial mechanism through which shipping companies sought to ensure the efficient transport of overseas resources critical for munitions production. Existing scholarship has thus primarily discussed the Shipping Alliance as the seed of more extensive wartime controls instituted over shipping in the years to follow. 

This presentation, which draws from a dissertation chapter, takes a different tack by focusing on the conditions under which shipping executives chose to form the alliance, rather than its eventual utilization during the war with China. In the early 1930s, Japanese shipping made a spectacular economic recovery after more than a decade wallowing in the doldrums. Swept out by a tide of inexpensive manufactures, ships flying the rising sun flag sailed forth into major shipping routes and asserted a new influence in ports worldwide. In response, established shipping interests, particularly those in the British Empire, sought to erect barriers against the expanded reach of the Japanese merchant marine, and shipping competition therefore became a major source of international friction by mid-decade. This presentation seeks to evaluate the role of such conflicts in the adoption of such strategies as the Shipping Alliance, while at the same time offering some preliminary comments on Japan’s shipping influence as an aspect of “invisible” imperial power.