Introduction

According to The preeminence of international financial centers by Howard Curtis Reed, Yokohama ranked fourth, Tokyo ninth and Osaka tenth as international banking centres in 1930. Three centres in Japan were among the second group after the two financial centres of London and New York in 1930. What factors enabled these three centres to reach such a level by that time? In answering this question, the Yokohama Specie Bank (Y.S.B.) must become the first object of observation. The bank occupied a dominant position in financing Japan's foreign trade, and during the 1920s it accounted for nearly 50 per cent of foreign exchange transactions for Japanese exports and imports. In addition, it was the largest in scale except for the Bank of Japan and was the most profitable among the large banks in 1929.

Two sets of its histories trace the development of the Y.S.B., ‘A history of the Yokohama Specie Bank’ and ‘A complete history of the Yokohama Specie Bank’. But the former only covers the period before 1920, and the latter chronologically describes the activities of the bank and is not a scholarly work. There are some other valuable scholarly works on the Y.S.B., but most of them are mainly concerned with its foreign exchange transactions and lack a composite analysis of the bank. The aim of this paper is to sketch broadly its activities during the period of the restored gold standard in Japan and outline its characteristics.