In the field of modern Japanese financial history there are few publications on the organs of finance for everyday people, such as pawnbrokers, although there are many works on the activities of the Bank of Japan, city banks, and regional banks. Previous studies on pawnbrokers focus mainly on those located in the countryside or downtown (shitamachi) Tokyo. Most of the authors argue that the pawnbrokers charged exorbitantly high interest rates to poor people who were in straitened circumstances. To explore the reality of pawnbrokers' activities, we conducted a statistical analysis of pawnbrokers in the city of Tokyo, and a case study of a pawnbroker (Shop "T") in Shiba ward in the under-explored, near-central part of Tokyo. In our study, we used the pawn books and customers lists of 1915, 1925 and 1935. Our analysis reveals that the pawning reflected local people's lifestyle, and its change over time as their ways of living became more Westernized and they had more leisure time. Contrary to what previous works have argued, we find that pawnbrokers played an indispensable role in the daily lives of ordinary consumers by providing them with ready liquidity in small amounts in the short term by using real material objects for security.

A veteran finance minister, Takahashi Korekiyo, brought an early recovery for Japan from the Great Depression of the 1930s by prescribing a combination of expansionary fiscal, exchange rate, and monetary policies. To explore the comprehensive transmission mechanism of Takahashi's macroeconomic policy package, including the expectation channel, we construct a structural vector auto-regression (S-VAR) model with three state variables (output, price, and the inflation expectations) and three policy variables (fiscal balance, exchange rate, and money stock). Our analysis reveals that the exchange rate adjustment undertaken as an independent policy tool had the strongest effect, and that changes in people's expectations played a significant role for escaping from the Great Depression. During the second half of 1931, in particular, speculation on Japan's departure from the gold standard and the inflation that was likely to follow reversed the existing expectations: instead of expecting deflation, people began to expect inflation, months ahead of the actual departure from the gold standard. As a whole, the choice of the level of the exchange rate was crucial for changing people's expectations as well as promoting exports. (C) 2014 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Japan defaulted on its public debt after the Second World War. This article addresses the question of how Japan lost its ability to sustain its public debt. We explore the sustainability of public debt in Japan before the War. We conduct statistical tests for the relationship between public debt and primary fiscal balance, and find that Japanese public debt was sustainable until 1931, and unsustainable in and after 1932. Narrative modes of analysis indicate that Japan lost its fiscal discipline because of the military's effective veto over budgetary processes and because of the absence of pressure for sound fiscal policy from international financial markets.

Why did policymakers adopt the gold standard? We first examine the political economy of Japan's adoption of the gold standard in 1897 by exploring the ex ante motives of policymakers as well as how the legislative decision to adopt gold won approval. We then show that joining the gold standard did not reduce Japanese interest rates or lead to a domestic investment boom. However, we find that membership in the gold standard increased Japan's exports by lowering transactions costs. Joining gold allowed Japan to tap into its growing share of global trade that was centered on the gold standard.

We conducted extensive research on the mechanism of emergence and development of money in a society. To the goal, we primarily focused on the Japanese monetary history through the 16-19th century, and employed an comparative approach across countries. We have revealed that, in the pre-modern period (up to the late 19th century), the mechanism of providing money through credit (inside money) was vital for the development of monetary economy, and that during the transition to the modern system, the society faced difficulties in transforming the existing system of the provision of credit to the modern one. Members published books and journal articles and presented results of analyses in numerous academic conferences

We conducted extensive research on the mechanism of emergence and development of money in a society. To the goal, we primarily focused on the Japanese monetary history through the 16-19th century, and employed an comparative approach across countries. We have revealed that, in the pre-modern period (up to the late 19th century), the mechanism of providing money through credit (inside money) was vital for the development of monetary economy, and that during the transition to the modern system, the society faced difficulties in transforming the existing system of the provision of credit to the modern one. Members published books and journal articles and presented results of analyses in numerous academic conferences

On the methodology of this project, we adopted an approach of comparative analysis focusing on not the dissimilarities but the similarity in payment across different regions and periods. Similarities here refer to diversity of the currency, multi-layered structure of the currency or separation between the measure of payment and the unit of account. As for the empirical research, we could find that there was a separation between measure of payment and unit of account in the early modern Japan based on the documents of a local merchant. In other regions such as Western Asia, Western Europe and China, we confirmed that the same phenomenon occurred during their pre-modern or modern period