Additionally, the Japanese government provided subsidies for the construction of Maritime Industrial Development Areas (MIDAs) in Japanese ports that eliminated the need for internal transshipment in Japan of raw materi-als imports. Japan’s coastline was ideally suited for this form of linkage and transport-based development (Kosai and Ogina 1984: 60–61). This transport pattern allowed Japanese steel mills and shipping firms to take advantage of the tremendous economies of scale available in bulk shipping to dramatically reduce production costs of steel in Japan by capturing all of these benefits for themselves (Bunker and Ciccantell 1995, 2003b).