Entangled Industrialization: Chinese Match Entrepreneurs in the Kobe Port, 1880s–1910s

This presentation examines diasporic Chinese merchant-manufacturers and their business activities in the Japanese port city of Kobe between the 1880s and the 1910s. Opened as a treaty port in 1868, Kobe rapidly emerged as Japan’s principal Asia-facing entrepôt. By the turn of the twentieth century, the Kobe–Osaka region had become the national hub of match production, accounting for the vast majority of Japan’s match exports to other parts of Asia. Focusing on the match industry—one of the city’s most emblematic modern industries—this presentation argues that diasporic Chinese merchant-manufacturers played a pivotal role in enabling Kobe’s industrial expansion. Operating as factory owners, investors, and intermediaries, they linked local production in Kobe to transnational markets in China and Southeast Asia.

Drawing on a range of sources, the presentation proceeds in three parts. It first outlines patterns of Chinese immigration to Kobe and the formation of the Chinese settlement in the treaty port’s Mixed Residence Area. It then turns to match factories as spaces where economic collaboration and competition unfolded across national lines. Finally, it analyses the ways in which Japanese statesmen and entrepreneurs understood and reacted to the growing Chinese economic presence in the treaty port Kobe in the final few decades of the nineteenth century. By foregrounding industrial knowledge and experience, this presentation reveals the entangled processes of Chinese and Japanese industrialization.