駿河貯蓄銀行の発展と定期積金 : 貯蓄預金から定期積金への発展をめぐって

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This paper will analyze the business conditions confronted by the management of the Suruga Savings Bank in the period between World War I and World War II--particularly in respect to the developmental process of savings deposits, which represent one of a savings bank's business activities. The Suruga Savings Bank was founded in May 1899 by the Numazu City (Shizuoka Prefecture)-headquartered Suruga Bank. The choice between either investing a portion of a bank's capital to expand its business by setting up a new in-house savings department or by establishing a daughter savings bank was one of the circumstances faced by all banks in Japan back then--not to mention the fact that it also provides a glimpse into the intrinsically savings-oriented special character of Japan's banking system. Although the Japanese banking system went through a critically disturbing period in the interwar years, it was during this interval that the system was reorganized through the fashioning of a multi-tiered financial structure: an arrangement made up of the major city banks reigning at the apex of the pyramid, with the regional banks (basically set up in line with a one-bank-per-prefecture principle) forming the middle echelon, and with the bottom tiers comprised of lower-ranking financial institutions. This process of wholesale rearrangement simultaneously involved a realigning of the nation's savings banks which took shape in the form of their being absorbed by or merging with the city and regional banks. And, it was in the course of this latter process that installment savings and deferred savings, both which till then were regarded as lines of business unique to savings banks, became permanent fixtures of--and eventually gave a savings-bank character to--Japan's banking system. Installment savings and deferred savings have the distinctive feature of savings deposits in the sense that they provide a means to save money through the periodic and continual accumulation of small sums of money. These modes of saving were made the exclusive province of savings banks--and all other financial institutions were prohibited from engaging in those lines of business operations--following the June 1915 amendment of the Savings Bank Act (a law that was promulgated in 1890, went into effect in 1893, and eventually abolished when the Savings Bank Law was put into force in January 1922). In the wake of the aforementioned amendment of the Savings Bank Act, the Suruga Savings Bank rapidly fine-tuned and up-graded its savings-deposit operations. Time deposits, checking deposits and petty current deposits--all which were homogeneous with conventional bank deposits--were either transferred to the father bank (the Suruga Bank) or converted to installment savings and/or deferred savings. All newly acquired savings deposits were subsequently accepted by the Suruga Savings Bank in the form of installment savings--specifically, as a form of saving having a five-year installment period. During this period, and in accordance with the government's hard-hitting policy aimed at encouraging the Japanese people to save, the Suruga Savings Bank went all-out in enhancing its installment-savings operations, while at the same time doggedly resisting the Finance Ministry's repeated requests that it dissolve its excessively close ties with the parent Suruga Bank--until the two eventually joined in a merger in December 1943. Meanwhile, the mode of saving money through periodic and continual accumulation gained widespread acceptance among the populace--specifically, in the form of savings institutions, which increasingly came to play an influential role at the grass-roots level in conformity with the so-called "everyday way of life" of the people. These institutions, small in scale and operating without statutes, primarily functioned in compliance with the communal restraints and controls then prevailing at the village level. However, since the onset of the early period of the Meiji era (1868-1912), when the government instituted policies designed to promote savings, these small institutions were co-opted by the central government, fortified with legal statutes and extensively encouraged to function as full-fledged savings institutions devoted to the aggressive drumming up of savings through the mode of periodic and continual accumulation of funds. Needless to say, money is saved as the result of ceaseless, day-to-day application, and this requires a certain amount of external pressure, and the savings institutions--precisely because they could exert collective influence at the community level--were neatly adapted to the occasion. In line with the playing out of the government's savings promotion policy, the nation's financial institutions strove to bring savings deposits under their own management by reinforcing their business ties with the savings institutions. However, in the first year of the Showa era (1926-1989), when the financial markets were hit by a series of business disruptions, the government moved to impose strict regulations on the links between the financial institutions and other kinds of business organizations. As a result, the financial institutions were forced to terminate their close working connections with the savings institutions: and the Suruga Bank and Suruga Savings Bank were no exception. But by this phase, periodic and continual savings were becoming firmly established as an integral part of the business operations of savings banks in the form of installment savings that were buttressed with modern contract clauses. Thus, although this type of savings was actively revived as a savings-institution policy during World War II, when the wartime government aggressively promoted nationwide savings campaigns, it had by then already become a solid part of the savings banks' business activities--and, subsequently, came to be firmly integrated into the banking system. That is to say, it was incorporated into the National Savings Institution Law in 1941 and formally established as the Depositors' Savings Institution System in 1942. The Suruga Savings Bank was merged with the Suruga Bank and the former's savings-bank functions were actively utilized as a means to manage new savings deposits under the aegis of the newly established law and system. In other words, the development of the savings bank business, along with the concomitant evolution of savings deposits into installment savings, during the interwar years constitute the wellspring of the system of exempting taxes on small savings--a policy which sustained the institution of national savings deposits in postwar Japan.
1995-05-31

駿河貯蓄銀行の発展と定期積金 : 貯蓄預金から定期積金への発展をめぐって

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