Privileges of challenging the market: The red gate student consumer cooperative as a welfare enterprise in pre-1945 Japan

This study explores the history of the Red Gate Student Consumer Cooperative at Tokyo Imperial University, an elite university in Japan, to consider its accomplishment and limitation as redistribution machine. While its elite founders successfully provided commodities inexpensively to its members, its staff were exposed to the potential exploitation for its competitive edge in prices and small-sized shops in the neighborhood were endangered as they could not compete with it. Based on this case study, I seek to explore the social basis for elite consumers’ challenges to the market and the inherent limitation of a market-based institution for economic redistribution.