明治日本における機械取引 : 新商品としての機械とその衝撃, Machine-dealers in Modern Tokyo and Yokohama: Machinery as new commercial goods and emerging alieness

戦前日本における機械取引の実態は未だ明らかではない。本論では、西洋渡来の科学技術を体化したモノとしての「機械」を取引することが、日本人商人に対して、どのような衝撃を、またいかなるタイミングにおいて与えていたのかを歴史的に検証した。その結果、機械の異質性は、初期の機械取引においては横浜の外国人商社や引取商による情報サービスに依存することができたが故に、当時の日本人商人にとってはそれほど深刻な経営課題をもたらすものではなく。国内での機械利用が高度化し、新規需要を開拓する上での工学的知識に優れた人材の役割が増大した明治30年代に、これらの人材の統制を巡る「店員行為問題」という形で初めて機械という商品の性質が経営上の課題結びついていたことが明らかとなった。, The purpose of this article is to investigate what problems merchants confronted through trading machinery in Meiji era. Especially, I focused on labor-management relations in machine-dealers and importance of technical knowledge in trading machinery. Some researcher indicated many degreed engineers worked for trading firms. But, in fact, almost all of the “merchant-engineers” worked for big concerns. So, It is still vague how Japanese traded those alien things generally. In fact, in early Meiji period, trading for machinery didn’t require some technical knowledge because foreign engineers who operated trading houses in Yokohama offered advice about technological issues. But, after Japanese-Russo War (1904-05), machine-dealers became to need technical knowledge of their clerks and themselves, because their customers who had have some machinery already, demanded more convincing statements. Knowledge embodied human-being. So, clerks could transfer opportunistically. Merchants responded this employment-related issue aggressively. They organized an association for controlling their clerks in 1911.