岡崎哲二 (Tetsuji Okazaki)

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Mitsubishi Corporation (Mitsubishi Shoji), a trading company under Mitsubishi Zaibatsu, increased its sales rapidly in the 1920s and 1930s, and threatened to catch up with Mitsui & Co. (Mitsui Bussan), the largest trading company in prewar Japan. In this paper, we constructed the data that enabled us to compare the sales growth of these two companies in detail. Using the data, we decomposed the increase of Mitsubishi's share into (a) the effect within each commodity or sales area, (b) the effect between commodities or sales areas, and (c) the interaction effect. It was found that the interaction effect as well as the within effect had a substantial positive impact on Mitsubishi's share increase, which implies that Mitsubishi aggressively expanded business in the growing markets.