Kokusan yakusho

• Japanese: 国産役所 (kokusan yakusho)

Kokusan yakusho, or "country products offices," were government entities created in a number of domains in the Edo period, to either manage the operations of domainal monopolies over certain local products, or to otherwise encourage or oversee the production of such products.

Some may have played a similar role within the domains to the clearinghouses established by the shogunate, such as the Nagasaki kaisho, to manage the import, export, and transportation/distribution of silver and of certain other high-value goods.

Most domains which did not have such offices earlier established them in the Bakumatsu period, seeking to capitalize on new opportunities for domainal economic strength in the wake of the sudden economic changes brought on by that period. Many of these were explicitly called Kokueki Offices, drawing upon a concept of domainal prosperity through envisioning & operating the domain as a single economic entity, a concept which originated in the 18th century. The Tokugawa shogunate similarly established a "National Prosperity [kokueki] Development Office" in 1862 to manage the import of silk and other products at Yokohama.

References

• Luke Roberts, Mercantilism in a Japanese Domain: The Merchant Origins of Economic Nationalism in 18th-Century Tosa, Cambridge University Press (1998), 201-202.