Keiei Shigaku (Japan Business History Review)
Online ISSN : 1883-8995
Print ISSN : 0386-9113
ISSN-L : 0386-9113
Research Note
The Building Warehouses of the Warehousing Industry in Japan from the 1920s to the First Half of the 1930s
A Case Study of Mitsubishi Logistics
Shohei Shibata
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2022 Volume 57 Issue 4 Pages 28-42

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Abstract

The study examines how Mitsubishi Logistics built its warehouses from the 1920s to the first half of the 1930s. The warehousing industry in Japan in the 1920s made fewer profits than in the 1910s because of the recession after World War I, but it became an issue that built earthquake-proof and fireproof warehouses. Some warehousing corporations understood that the replacement of their buildings resulted in more gains generally, but they tended to have no financial leeway in their management. Therefore, they tried to get profits by using their existing warehouses as a rule. On the contrary, the major warehousing corporations, including Mitsubishi Logistics, built their warehouses constructed with reinforced concrete positively and scrapped their old ones. Furthermore, there were cases of rebuilding warehouses to introduce the equipment to stock specific goods according to a change of distribution as raw silk. Mitsubishi Logistics began to replace its warehouses before the big earthquake caused in the Kanto region in 1923, which rebuilt about half of its ones to be earthquake-proof and fireproof earlier than other major warehousing corporations early in the 1930s. The investment in buildings was also a huge burden on the major warehousing corporations, so there were some cases in which the plan for building warehouses could not be decided readily. However, Mitsubishi Logistics mainly carried out the strategy which changed loans to corporate bonds and could raise funds with fewer costs. In addition, Mitsubishi Logistics could drastically reduce rent warehouses and fire insurance by building new ones, which could also control their costs. In the warehousing industry from the second half of the 1920s to the first half of the 1930s, the performance of Mitsubishi Logistics was superior to the others as a result of the introduction of these corporate activities earlier.

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