 In doing so, they began to replace the Osaka rice brokers; by 1868, the Osaka rice brokers, in many ways the first bankers in Japan, had disappeared.The next step in the development of the "ie" would come with the opening of Japan to foreign trade in the 1850s-60s.Many "ie" reorganized and came to be known as "sōgō shōsha" (総合商社), trading companies which focused on exchanging domestic goods for foreign goods, which they would then resell in Japan's major cities.