The Japanese government was able to sustain total war against the Allied Powers for almost half a decade after losing foreign loans and reserves and being subject to sanctions. It did so by systematically mobilising civilian wealth through semi-compulsory bond sales, taxation, and savings campaigns. In addition to implementing propaganda campaigns at the grassroots, the government encouraged commercial banks to expand their branch networks to absorb people’s savings. Several Japanese metropolitan (toshi ginkō) and regional banks (chihō ginkō), including the Dai-shi Bank in Niigata, the Hachijūni Bank in Nagano, and the Nomura Bank in Osaka, have cited government savings campaigns as a motivation behind opening branches during WWII in their corporate histories. Some banks opened branches in areas with a high concentration of factories to absorb cash from nearby factory workers. From August 1944 to July 1945, for example, Shiga Bank opened seven new sub-branches (shutchōsho) in Kyoto. According to the bank’s official history, these branches were set up to absorb the cash of workers from nearby factories operated by munition manufacturers such as Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, Shimazu Corporation, and Japan Storage Battery Company. There are, in fact, rich collections on local-level financial mobilisation in wartime Japan, such as the official histories of regional banks. Yet these are often overlooked by scholars studying the social history of wartime Japan. Drawing on local and branch-level data, this blog post employs several digital tools to map the locations of munitions factories and bank branches in Kyoto. This illustrates the connections between branch locations and the absorption of civilian savings, paving the way for an examination of prefectural-level financial mobilisation in wartime Japan.
The addresses of bank branches in wartime Kyoto can be found in a directory titled Kyoto Prefecture Financial Handbook (Kyōto-fu kin’yū yōran), published by the Commerce and Industry Section of the Kyoto Prefecture’s Economic Department in April 1943. It recorded the locations of a hundred bank branches across the city. The addresses of the 49 factories in Kyoto city that were designated for the Japanese Army and Navy can be found in a 1942 survey, now held at the National Institute for Defence Studies. I utilised IMMARKUS, a semantic image annotation tool equipped with a range of generative AI models devised by Hilde De Weerdt and her team, to perform the OCR on the text in the images. While I employed Qwen3-VL-235B for this task (Figure 1a), other AI models such as Gemini 2.5 Flash produced comparable results. I then manually checked and formatted the results in a spreadsheet. Depending on the density of the text and the resolution of the image files, AI models can identify 60 to 70 per cent of the content, including that from handwritten manuscripts (Figure 1b). This accelerates the cleaning and information extraction processes. As I am using materials published before 1945, I have also converted the kanji to tōyō kanji to achieve the most accurate results when searching for the coordinates of bank branches and munitions factories using contemporary digital tools such as the GeoLOD platform and Google Maps. GeoLOD is useful for finding historic locations (Figure 2), while Google Maps is effective for locating existing constructions, such as the Kyoto Sumitomo Building, where the Kyoto branch of the Industrial Bank of Japan was located. The addresses provided in the Kyoto Prefecture Financial Handbook and the 1942 survey were too granular to appear in existing dictionaries of historic Japanese places, so searching for them on the GeoLOD platform often returned no results. One solution is to input part of the address, such as the name of the town (chō or machi) or ward (ku), rather than the full address, into the platform. If no result is found, I will then try to find it using Google Maps.
Fig. 1a: Using IMMARKUS to Transcribe a Printed Book.
Fig. 1b: Using IMMARKUS to Transcribe a Handwritten Manuscript.
Fig. 2: GeoLOD Interface
The results can be visualised in various ways, such as by plotting the locations of bank branches and munitions factories on a map. Figure 3 shows a result produced by Microsoft Power BI, but similar results can be produced in QGIS.
Fig. 3: Bank Branches and Munitions Factories in Kyoto (Produced by Power BI)
In addition to the static map, I attempted to convert the dataset of bank branches and munitions factories into an interactive map. I created the interactive map using Codex, and manually reviewed, tested, and edited the results. I provided Codex with a spreadsheet containing the names and coordinates of the bank branches and munition factories. The map shows the locations of bank branches and munitions factories across Kyoto during the Pacific War. You can select any combination of the three location layers. You can also use the panel on the right to select the banks and companies to display on the map. Initially, Codex produced a fairly complete interactive map, though it required several rounds of refinement. I began by asking it to add a separate layer for Shiga Bank’s branches and to make the three layers, ‘Munitions Factories’, ‘Shiga Bank’, and ‘Other Banks’, independently toggleable, so that users could select any combination of them. The first version included only limited geographical detail, showing a few major avenues, rivers, and the boundaries of selected Kyoto city wards. I therefore asked Codex to add further geographical context, including the names of major wards and the boundaries of Kyoto Prefecture. Finally, I requested a panel that would allow users to select specific banks and companies to display, along with several stylistic adjustments, such as adding a brief description of the map and reordering the four labels on the left. Figure 4 shows that bank branches are concentrated around Karasuma Street, while munitions factories are scattered throughout the surrounding areas of the city. It should be noted, however, that the bank branches around Karasuma Street are mostly branches of metropolitan banks, whose headquarters were located outside Kyoto, including Sanwa Bank, Tōkai Bank, and Yasuda Bank. Regional banks, such as Shiga Bank — a relatively latecomer compared to metropolitan banks — decided to open branches in remote areas, such as Yamashina Ward. The interactive map also shows that two of Shiga Bank’s newly established sub-branches in 1944 and 1945, located in Kitaōji and Kujō, were neighbours of the Japan Storage Battery Company and the Takashimaya Iida Company (Figures 5a and 5b). This further confirms the claim made in the bank’s official history.
Fig. 4: Interactive Map Overview
Fig. 5a: Shiga Bank’s Kitaōji Sub-Branch and Nearby Munitions Factories
Fig. 5b: Shiga Bank’s Kujō Sub-Branch and Nearby Munitions Factories
This interactive map is an experiment in incorporating digital tools and AI models alongside local and branch-level archives to examine prefectural-level financial mobilisation in wartime Japan. A future task will be to make use of overlooked local archives to conduct nationwide or even empire-wide examinations of Japan’s capital mobilisation during the Second Sino-Japanese and Pacific Wars.
For the interactive map, please see Wong, Tsz Ho. 2026. “Munition Production and Financial Mobilisation in Wartime Kyoto.” Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.22772461.
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