People and Post Offices: Consumption and Postal Services in Japan from the 1870s to the 1970s

Although the importance of transport infrastructure in the process of industrialisation has long been recognised, ‘for economic historians, postal systems are a neglected topic; many economic history textbooks ignore them altogether’ (John, 2003, p. 315). And yet postal services have long enabled the movement of physical items and money, and played a key role in the transmission of information. In the nineteenth century new state-run systems transformed the scale and speed of postal communication, and other related activities, dramatically widening accessibility across classes and populations. As one observer of the British Post Office remarked in 1938, it was not just a question of running a vast and intricate postal service, a telegraph service, a telephone service and the remittance of money to anywhere in the country and almost anywhere in the world. The Postmaster-General was also ‘a banker with whom one in every four of the population has an account … sells £98 million worth of health and unemployment insurance stamps during the year, pays 220 millions of old age and widows’ and orphans’ pensions, and dispenses licences of many kinds … He is the largest employer of labour in the country and, last but not least, he is a tax gatherer’ (Crutchley, 1938, p. 23). This wide remit was far from atypical (for example, Fuller, 1972, p. 238 for the US).