Short Abstract

The following paper examines the importance of shipping, trade, and transport infrastructure in the interwar period to reveal how “flagship” Japanese companies competed for trade, market-penetration, and business interests in the emerging markets of Australia, Southeast Asia, India, and South Asia.

Long Abstract

The commencement of regular Japanese shipping routes: Yokohama-Bombay (1893), followed by Kobe-Calcutta (1911), Kobe-Madras (1933), and the Yokohama-Bombay-Bandar Abbas “Persian route” (1933), not only facilitated voyages and interactions between the people of pre-independent India and Japan, but also an interconnectedness among the port-cities along shipping routes, a mélange of maritime cultures, blending indigenous traditions with influences of distant lands. These people-mediated exchanges—varied in duration, context, and intensity—nucleated new areas and facets of mutual interest and collaborations. While some of these cross-cultural and commercial encounters have received scholarly attention, many remain underrepresented in present-day academic discourse. The research presented here seeks to revisit and illuminate these overlooked narratives through multiple disciplinary lenses, examining materials from the Japanese Company Records Project started with the “gift” repatriation of Japanese commercial records seized (by the Australian government) during the 1941-1945 war with Japan, now held at the National Archives of Japan (NAJ).

Historically rooted in a period marked by transformative aspirations—India’s evolving vision of post-colonial nationhood and Japan’s rapid rise as an Asia’s first industrialized power, culminating indeed with its own “co-prosperity sphere”—these exchanges offer a rich field of inquiry into how people imagined, experienced, and enacted both cultural and diplomatic dialogue and traded internationally for commercial development in the emerging regional markets of Southeast Asia and South Asia. Against the “Weary Titan” narrative of Britain’s purported imperial decline, the rise of Japan as the “Britain of the East” has long captured popular attention and deserves corresponding scholarly analysis. Yet at present, studies concerning the shipping industry—the very infrastructure underpinning these people-mediated exchanges—have become virtually non-existent. Research in historical economic science has replaced that of commercial and economic history, and the wider study of history had become circumscribed from its political economy. Ultimately, a further, long-term purpose of the research associated with the Kizuna India Conference and the Japanese Company Records Project is, therefore, to clarify how shipping and trade frictions in Australasia, Southeast Asia, and South Asia became emblematic of wider political tensions associated with empires and the bloc economies of the interwar period.