Tokyo Commodity Exchange Tokyo Commodity Exchange Tokyo Commodity Exchange, also known as TOCOM, is Japan’s largest and one of Asia’s most prominent commodity futures exchanges. TOCOM operates electronic markets for precious metals, oil, rubber and soft commodities. It offers futures and options contracts for precious metals (gold, silver, platinum and palladium); energy (crude oil, gasoline, kerosene and gas oil); natural rubber and agricultural products (soybeans, corn and azuki). TOCOM was established in 1984 with the merger of the Tokyo Textile Exchange, founded in 1951, the Tokyo Rubber Exchange and the Tokyo Gold Exchange. The exchange became a for-profit shareholder-owned company in 2008. It
Commodity pathway diversion to identify in which phase of its life an object is considered a commodity. Appadurai defines a commodity situation as "the situation in which [an object's] exchangeability for some other thing is a socially relevant feature." In his introduction to "The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective", Appadurai references the work of Nancy Munn and Igor Kopytoff as influential to the discussion of commodity pathways and diversions. Both scholars advocate analyzing the entire trajectory or "social life" of a commodity to understand its full value. In her article "The Spatiotemporal Transformations of Gawa Canoes", anthropologist Nancy Munn, argues