Postwar Japan—Postal Savings and Agricultural Cooperatives as the Alternative Financial System

The chapter overviews the transition and development of the financial system financed with popular funds after World War II. The financial system with popular funds still exists up to the present, and an outline of how it developed through the postwar period and into the 21st century is necessary in order to further understand. In the course of Japan’s postwar economic recovery and the subsequent period of high economic growth, the postal savings and industrial cooperatives continued to expand financially. The alternative financial system undoubtedly grew in step with this. What developments did this financial system, initially built up in the early modern period to counter the instability of the commercial or capitalist market economy, witness after World War II? To what extent were its functions in the postwar inherited from the prewar period, or were they altered- or abandoned entirely? This chapter presents an institutional overview of the postwar development of Japan’s alternative financial system covered in this book. In addition, this chapter seeks to reposition the functions and roles of postal savings and cooperative unions in the postwar Japanese economy from a medium- and long-term perspective by re-examining contemporary studies on the FILP, as well as agricultural cooperatives, accumulated after the war by viewing them as studies related to the network of popular funds.