著者

飯田 隆

出版者

法政大学経済学部学会

雑誌

経済志林 = 経済志林 (ISSN:00229741)

巻号頁・発行日

vol.72, no.4, pp.67-85, 2005-03-07

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In Japan, financial administration which was carried out by the Ministry of Finance was known as "Convoy System (Goso Sendan Hoshiki)" since World War II. This "system" regulated larger banks with higher efficiency in order to put smaller banks whose management had poor efficiency on an equal footing in the financial system. This phrase refers to escorting cargo ships in war in which the speed of the escort is adjusted to the slowest ship. The problem is who was using this phrase for the first time, when it was, and where he was using it. In this paper, after careful investigation, it is concluded that a writer named Yamamoto Saburo was that person. However, his actual identity remains unclear, and one cannot deny the possibility that he was a bureaucrat in the Ministry of Finance. It seems that this phrase had been used inside the Ministry of Finance in the latter half of the 1960s. In that case, maybe, the bureaucrats who joined the Japanese navy during World War II began to use it. But as the Ministry of Finance itself could not use this phrase openly or officially, it was not known in the private sector. However, after Yamamoto Saburo used this phrase in a financial journal in 1976, it came to be used widely in the financial journalism. Among dictionaries of banking and finance or economics, the word "Goso Sendan Hoshiki" appeared frequently after 1998, which was the year that Japanse financial administration changed and the so-called "convoy system" came to an end.