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- Title
戦前期東京における質屋業の統計的分析.
- Authors
Sugiyama Shinya
- Abstract
This statistical survey of the Tokyo pawnbroking business for the period from 1906 to 1938 is based on the statistical yearbooks of the Tokyo municipal government and various reports on pawnbroking. After a decline around the time of the Meiji Restoration (1868), the number of pawnshops increased to a peak of 1,334 in 1918, but shrank to 408 after the Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923. Pawnshops were financial organizations with close relationship to their neighborhoods, providing short-term small loans to ordinary people in return for mortgages on items of movable property. They were managed as individual or family-based businesses, with levels of working capital as low as about twenty to thirty thousand yen. Their main business involved appraising the value of items offered as security and obtaining interest on loans. Pawnshops flourished until 1922, but the earthquake represented a severe blow to their activities. Recovery was interrupted by the depression of the early 1930s. The volume of business declined, and the value of pawned items decreased. The annual rate of turnover of working capital decreased, leading to falling profit rates and a severe downturn in the business of pawnbroking.
- Subjects
JAPAN; PAWNBROKERS; PAWNBROKING; BUSINESS enterprises; HISTORY of Tokyo, Japan; KANTO Earthquake, Japan, 1923; TWENTIETH century; HISTORY
- Publication
Socio-Economic History / Shakai-Keizai Shigaku, 2014, Vol 80, Issue 3, p9
- ISSN
0038-0113
- Publication type
Article