When the Kō Became a Bank
Japan’s second-tier regional banks are the descendants of a Kamakura-period savings club. As kō were run for profit through the Meiji era their numbers ran wild — 831 operators by the end of 1914. The Mujin Business Act of 1915 made the business a licensed one, and two years later just 137 companies held a licence; 803 had gone. After the war, the Mutual Loan Bank Act of 1951 converted 73 mujin companies at a stroke into «mutual loan banks» — the skeleton of the kō, paying in by instalments and taking turns to receive, became a banking product. Then between 1989 and 1990 every one of those mutual banks converted again, into ordinary banks: today’s second-tier regional banks. Seven hundred years for a village gathering to become a law, then a company, then a bank. Only one firm still runs mujin itself: Nihon Jūtaku Mujin. There is also a claim that Japanese instalment selling descends from the mujin kō — by way of the wanbune, the boats that carried lacquerware out in the farming off-season and collected payment the following year, which Tasaka Zenshirō is said to have developed into instalment sales of lacquerware and kimono. That thread never reaches a primary source, so this map draws it to the instalment plan as its faintest line: my own reading.