1 Autobiographical note: I first visited Japan at age 30, and first interested myself in Japanese economic thought at age 35.

2 We cannot attempt to consider indigenous Japanese economic thought. During the Tokugawa period, it remained as it had been for centuries, largely normative with both Confucian and Buddhist bases, but with an overlay of Eastern-style mercantilism which apparently owed little to residual Western contacts. The Buddhist economics popularized in the late E. F. Schumacher's Small is Beautiful (New York: Harper and Row, 1975), ch. 4, seems to have been unimportant outside of a minority of Buddhist monasteries.Google Scholar

The standard English-language account of Tokugawa-era economic thought remains the historical work of Sir George Sansom, which relies heavily on the encyclopaedic essays of Honjō Eijirō in several volumes of the Kyoto University Economic Review during the 1930s. Sansom interweaves his discussion with considerations of both economic conditions and general intellectual history.Google Scholar See his Japan: A Short Cultural History (New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, rev. ed. 1962)Google Scholar, ch. 21 (3), 23. For more detail, see Sansom, , A History of Japan 1615–1867 (Tokyo and Rutland, Vt.: Tuttle, 1974)Google Scholar, ch. 8–10, 11 (4), 13, 15–17, and The Western World and Japan (Tuttle, 1977)Google Scholar ch. 14 (6). Older but still useful is Garrett Droppers, Some Old Japanese Economic Theories in the Light of Modern Thought, Transactions of the Asiatic Society of Japan, vol. 24 (1896), pp. vi–xxiii.Google Scholar

A typical critique by later Japanese scholars of purely native Tokugawa-period economics is made by Sumiya Mikio and Koji Taira, in a digest of Ishibashi Gorō, Ishin Zengo ni Okeru Gaikoku Bōeki ni Tsuite (Foreign trade at the Time of the [Meiji] Restoration, Shirin (04 and 07, 1923)):Google Scholar

3 The literal translation is one country, one castle which means nothing in English. The connotation is of safeguarding oneself from criticism by specializing in something that nobody else knows about.

4 Paris, rather than Madrid or Lisbon, was the cultural Mecca of several generations of Latin American aristocrats during the half-century before the first World War.

5 I have heard of no similar results from Ethiopia, following the stationing there of the Economic Commission for Africa.

6 The radio cassette came into its own in connection with the Iranian revolution of 1978–79, when Iranian exiles and refugees in France had no access to French radio transmitters. The Ayatollah Khomeini made full use of this device to propagate his political and religious views; I do not know whether his principal economic spokesman during his French exile, Abolhassan Bani-Sadr, was also smuggling taped messages on economic subjects from Paris to Teheran.

7 The Dutch East India Company, confined in Japan to the island of Deshima in Nagasaki Bay and to one ship a year from Holland, set up no educational facilities. On the Japanese side, the rangakusha (scholars in Dutch) had operated largely as one-teacher enterprises, without formal institutional organization, and their main educational purpose had been the training of interpreters and translators in an array of fields which did not include economics. It was from just such a school, specializing in English instead of Dutch, that the contemporary Keio University arose. Compare FukuzawaYukichi, Autobiography (Tr. Kiyooka) (Tokyo: Hokuseido1948), ch. 2, 3, 5, 11.Google Scholar

8 For example, the first lecturer on political economy at Tokyo Imperial University was an American, Ernest Fenollosa, who stayed in Japan for 13 years (1877–90). His lectures were based on J. S. Mill's Principles, and his name survives less for his economic scholarship than for his avocation, the collection of Japanese art and the fostering of its appreciation in America. On Fenollosa and other forgotten worthies, see Bell, J. Fred, Origins of Japanese Academic Economics, Monumenta Nipponica, vol. 16 (1960–61), pp. 263–288.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

9 Had the Dutch language retained in 1850 its cultural prominence of two centuries before, might Japan too have retained its Tokugawa-era cultural subservience to the Netherlands in things Western? Despite the appeal of laziness, I suspect not, from the desire of the Japanese government to avoid the cultural position of, say, Java under Dutch rule.

10 Fortuitiously for a number of reasons of both technological and political history. It is interesting for the Japanologist to speculate upon the counterfactual consequences for Japan of substantially earlier development of rayon and nylon as substitutes for silk, or of avoiding the Taiping Rebellion in the silk-producing areas of East Central China, or of rapid easing of the pébrine blight in the silk-worm regions of France and Italy.

11 The Austro-Hungarian Empire, at least as much as Britain or France, represented a certain static Establishmentarian self-satisfaction associated with countries whose glorious futures lie behind them. It was of course unfortunate for Japanese economics that so few of the Japanese economics students went to Vienna and so many to Berlin during the heyday of Austrian economics. True, the Austrian Joseph Schumpeter has been in later years more influential in Japan than has any single German scholar – Karl Marx excepted – but his influence began only after he had left Vienna for Bonn (and later for Harvard).

12 Sumiya and Taira (op. cit., p. 4) believe that the shift from British (meaning John Stuart Mill) to German (meaning Historismus) domination of Japanese economic thought came quite early in the universities, but only later among the private scholars who worked by themselves or in business establishments.

13 Some of my American colleagues in American universities, specialists in foreign languages and literatures (and not only there!) will sometimes admit, after a drink or two, that in their fields the development I have pictured for Economics in Japan is not unknown on their side of the Pacific Ocean. In Economics, we remember William Smart as translator of the Austrians, and William Jaffé as translator of Walras.

In Japan too, such phenomena as the above are by no means confined to Economics. As an example, consider the career of Tsubouchi Shōyō, perhaps the foremost literary critic of the Meiji Era. His best-known critical essay is Shosetsu Shinzui (Essence of the Novel), 1885. An early specialist in English language and literature, Tsubouchi had previously achieved fame as translator of Shakespeare's plays and Scott's novels.Google Scholar

14 Fukuzawa, op. cit., p. 201. Chalmers, mentioned by Schumpeter as an also ran of the 1790–1870 period (op. cit., p. 468f.) was a follower of Malthus (and precursor of Keynes) in maintaining the possibility of general overproduction and denying the validity of Say's Law.Google Scholar

15 Schumpeter says despairingly of Gottl (op. cit., p. 854) that I fear the only way of appreciating [him] – or else my reason for excluding him – is to read him, which I have not done. Later (ibid., p. 1150) he comments on the wide if temporary influence of the German romantic school, with special reference to Gottl and to Othmar Spann. (How correctly his Japanese followers understood or interpreted Gottl I cannot say.)

16 Makoto, Itoh, The Development of Marxian Economics in Japan, ch. 1 of Itoh, Value and Crisis (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1980), p. 15.Google Scholar The first Japanese translation of the Communist Manifesto (by Sakai Toshihiko and Kōtoku Shūsui) appeared in a labor paper in 1904, and the first Japanese condensation of Capital (vol. i) (by Yamakawa Hitoshi) in another such paper five years later. The first complete translation of Capital (by Takabatake Motoyuki) was not completed until 1924, a dozen years after the end of the Meiji era. (There have been many subsequent translations.) (p. 168, note 12.) In addition to Professor Itho's book, I have had access to typewritten English-language manuscripts by Thomas T. Sekine, Matsuura Tamotsu, and Kamata Takeji, all dealing with the rise of Japanese Marxism and its conflict with post-Marxian thought.Google Scholar

17 At least one of the socialist leaders, Katayama Sen, was American-trained (Maryville College, Grinnell College, Union Theological Seminary). At this point (late Meiji) Katayama was a Christian Socialist and not yet a Marxist; he would end his days in 1933, however, in Russia as a member of the Central Committee of the Soviet Communist Party.Google Scholar

18 Itoh, op. cit., pp. 17–26.Google Scholar

19 Edited by Noro Eitarō; Tokyo: Iwanami, 1932–33.Google Scholar

20 Named for the Rōnōtō (Labor-Farmer Party), a short-lived political movement with which many of its principal writers were affiliated.Google Scholar

21 A more favorable view of the controversy, with copious notes on the principal controversialists and their work, is found in Sumiya and Taira, op. cit., ch. 15.Google Scholar

22 Positions associated with Joseph Schumpeter largely escaped this general condemnation, possibly because Schumpeter had been at Harvard since 1930.Google Scholar

23 This is not to deny that older-generation prewar Marxists had better over-all records than their ideological opponents for resistance to and persecution by Japanese militarists before and during World War II. (German Jews had better over-all records of anti-Nazism than German Gentiles, and for similar reasons!) Also, in addition to wartime classical economists, the younger aktiv Marxian contingent included numbers of lower-echelon fascists who, as in other countries, found it more natural to see the revolutionary-Communist light than the impersonal-market one.Google Scholar

24 Stigler, George, The Mathematical Method in Economics, in Stigler, , Five Lectures on Economic Problems (London: Longmans Green, 1948), p. 37.Google Scholar

25 Many possible applicants who might easily have survived the screening yielded to risk-aversion and refused to subject themselves to it. Others refused to apply for visas or scholarships to American universities.Google Scholar

26 Nakayama Ichirō, op. cit. (Tokyo: Iwanami, 1933).Google Scholar

27 Matsuura Tomotsu, The Conflict Situation: Marxian Political Economy and Modern Economics (typewritten, 1982), p. 11, note 10.Google Scholar

28 Schumpeter (op. cit., p. 827) on Léon Walras;Google Scholar

So far as pure theory is concerned, Walras is in my opinion the greatest of all economists. His system of economic equilibrium, uniting, as it does, the quality of ‘revolutionary’ creativeness with the quality of classic synthesis, is the only work by an economist that will stand comparison with the achievements of theoretical physics. Compared with it, most of the theoretical writings of [his] period – and beyond – however valuable in themselves and however original subjectively, look like boats beside a liner, like inadequate attempts to catch some particular aspect of Walrasian truth. It is the outstanding landmark on the road that economics travels toward the status of a rigorous or exact science and, though outmoded by now, still stands at the back of much of the best theoretical work of our time.Google Scholar

29 My authority for many of these statements is Fr. Antonio Sagrista, S.J., of Jōchi (Sophia) University, but I have mislaid my copy of his monograph.Google Scholar

30 Bronfenbrenner, M., The Vicissitudes of Marxian Economics, History of Political Economy (Fall, 1970); Itoh, op. cit., p. 107, note 31.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

31 The Japanese kōtō-gakkoō, while strictly academic, offers two alternative curricula, bunka and rika. The bunka curriculum requires more languages, literature, and history; the rika curriculum, more natural science and mathematics.Google Scholar

32 At one eminent institution, the main focus of the course in Marketing, as taught by a Marxist, is to consider the extent to which marketing techniques can save the capitalist system from its internal contradictions.Google Scholar

33 Itoh, op. cit., p. 29. Also ibid., p. 11, for a sketch of the situation at Tokyo University, where Professor Itoh himself teaches. The independence between Marxian and other economists is emphasized by the existence, already noted, of separate economic societies.

34 Sekine, , Uno-Riron: A Japanese Contribution to Marxian Political Economy, Journal of Economic Literature (September 1975); Itoh, op. cit., pp. 37–45. (Professor Sakine disagrees strongly with my appraisal of Uno-Ricor as no more Marxist than Rostow.)Google Scholar

35 Bronfenbrenner, M., ob. cic., American Economic Review (05, 1956).Google Scholar

36 After expulsion from High School in Nagoya for agitation against the Manchurian invasion, Tsuru was educated at Lawrence College and Harvard University, but chose to return to Japan during World War II. There he served in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Economic Stabilization Board (now Economic Planning Agency) before joining the Institute of Economic Research at Hitotsubashi University and eventually rising to the Presidency of Hitotsubashi. After his presidential term, Tsuru has become editor of the editorial page of the prestigious Asahi Shimbun, a nation-wide newspaper. (In obeisance to honyaku-gakumon, Tsuru also headed a group of Hitotsubashi graduates who translated Paul Samuelson's Economics into Japanese.)Google Scholar

37 Nomiya Ryūtarō and Yamamoto Kōzō, Japan: The Officer in Charge of Economic Affairs, History of Political Economy (Fall 1981)Google Scholar

38 Ibid., p. 605.

39 In the Finance Ministry this program takes up the recruit's third year, unless he has been selected for two years of graduate study in the West. (Ibid., p. 610f.)