Yokohama Specie Bank

Yokohama Specie Bank was the quasi-governmental Japanese foreign-exchange bank founded in Yokohama in 1880 to finance Japan’s import and export trade in hard currency. It acted as the government’s overseas financial agent, opened branches from Bombay (1894) and Hong Kong (1896) outward, and by the 1920s handled close to half of Japan’s trade-finance foreign exchange, funding the shipping and trading houses behind the merchant fleet. Reorganized as the Bank of Tokyo in 1946 after the war.