Introduction

Summary

IN ORDER TO clearly explain the starting point for the major exploration of Japanese-German economic relations in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, which I am commencing with this work, I should like to briefly review my own research to date.

My initial research was focused solely on German economic and business history, and the point at which I turned to studying the history of Japanese-German economic relations came in the early summer of 1985, when I visited the Hoechst Company Archives in Frankfurt am Main. There, in addition to materials on the dissolution of IG Farben after the Second World War, which was the object of my research at the time, I found a wealth of materials, of a better quality, and in greater quantity, than I had imagined would have been possible, on the German chemical industry's Japan strategy, and hastily added them to the list of documents I wished to read and copy. Subsequently, I was blessed with similar good fortune in the BASF archives in Ludwigshafen, and after returning to Japan, I also surveyed the materials held by several Japanese companies, which were mentioned in the German documents. Then for six months in 1988, I ventured to study more than twenty German archives, and was able to read many more Japanese company records after I returned home. Thus my first steps on the road to studying the history of Japanese-German economic relations began with the history of relations between companies.

The results of these two data gathering visits to Germany, and the follow-ups in Japan, were published as a number of articles in both Japanese and English. Then, viewing the reality of German unification from the sidelines, in 1992 I was able to combine these articles into two volumes: Nichi-Doku kigyō kankei-shi (The History of Japanese-German Business Relations) (Yūhikaku) and Ii-Gee faruben no tai-Nichi senryaku: senkan-ki Nichi-Doku kigyō kankei-shi (IG Farben's Japan Strategy: A History of Japanese-German Business Relations in the Inter-war Period) (University of Tokyo Press). During this time, in addition to the work represented by these two volumes, my interests and studies developed in three separate directions.