34 JAPAN - CO-OPERATION AND ASSOCIATION 



cereals generally and of rice in particular, in the last few years. We shall not 

 return to the subject, but we cannot help mentioning how often such fluc- 

 tuations are due to artificial causes and how much more they are the result 

 of the intrigues of speculators than of the real condition of the market. 



It is not, however, to be imagined that the fever of speculation, which 

 has become so pronounced of late, was altogether unknown in Japan in the 

 past. The idea of co-operation among the producers for the defence of their 

 common interests when selling their produce is certainly no new thing 

 there : a first and admirable example we find in those beiken soko (i) or 

 general rice warehouses, founded in the seventeenth and eighteenth 

 centuries and now prospering and flourishing again under a somewhat 

 changed form, resembling very closely the monti frumentari instituted in 

 the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in certain Itahan cities. 



However, these beiken-soko could not by themselves be a sufiicient 

 check to speculation on the one hand, nor a sufiicient aid to the producers 

 on the other ; their necessarily limited number and their concentration in 

 particular locahties were the principal causes of this. 



The State, though granting them moral support and not a few facil- 

 itations, did not directly intervene to maintain or to found them, and left 

 it to private persons to proceed on their own account to the defence of their 

 own interests as producers and consumers against the intrigues and im- 

 positions of speculators. 



There were two types of institution for the organization of the sale of 

 cereals, namely : 



1st. co-operative societies for sale, 

 2nd. associations for collective sale. 



We shall now speak in detail of each of these types of organization 

 and give in each case a few examples so as to show more celarly their 

 constitution, working and efficacy. 



§ 2. Co-operative sale societies. 



We have elsewhere spoken of the Japanese co-operative sale societies (2) 

 and shall only return to the subject in so far as concerns those especi- 

 ally occupied with the sale of cereals. It must, however, be observed 

 that many of them engage indeed in the business but as a quite secondary 

 matter ; they sell grain as they would sell any other produce of their 

 members. It is not these we intend to study. 



There are, also, co-operative sale societies, for which the sale of 

 cereals and more especially of rice, is, if not their only, at least their prin- 

 cipal business. 



(i) Cfr. Bulletin of Economic and Social Intelligence, June, iyi3, pp. i47 et seqq. 

 (2) Cfr. Bulletin of Economic and Social Intelligence, January, 1913. 



