Content provided in partnership with
Business Services Industry
Economic Thought and Modernization in Japan
American Journal of Economics and Sociology, The, July, 1999 by Michael J. Gootzeit
Shiro Sugihara and Toshihiro Tanaka, eds., Cheltenham, U.K.: Edward Elgar, 1998. Bibliography and Index. ISBN 1 85898 624 9.
There is a tendency among historians and commentators to imagine that Japan westernized its Confucian-style culture after Commodore Perry's noisy arrival in 1853, or at least after the 1867 Meiji Restoration. This is incorrect. The Japanese knew the colonists were on their way as early as the 19th century and struggled to industrialize (and build a modern army) as a survival strategy. This book is about the intellectual backdrop in Japan that helped shape these policy debates - it is about Japanese economic thought.
- Most Popular Articles in News
- The Ten Best Laptop bags
- Tata plans cheapest-ever car for Indian market
- GLOBALIZATION AND THE DEVELOPMENT OF UNDERDEVELOPMENT OF THE THIRD WORLD
- Corn is good for you; Corn is not only a tasty treat, but also a cereal that ...
- THE 50 BEST STYLISH HANDBAGS TO CARRY
- More »
Economic discussion in Japan dates back to the start of the Tokugawa period (16th century) but it was mostly about the linkages between the economy and morality. The ideas of civil society and individualism had not yet made their appearance. Still, Baien Miura (1723-1789) anticipated equilibrium analysis and wrote about the need to distribute the [agricultural] surplus widely among the people - perhaps through taxation - or else a balance would not be maintained (p. 16). The opening essays by Professors Shiro Sugihara and Masamichi Komuro summarize the early economic literature.
Meiji Japan is covered in great detail in chapters written by Professors Jiro Kumagai, Takashi Fujii, Takutoshi Inoue, and Kiichiro Yagi. Certainly by the 1880s, the Japanese economists realized that Western-style marketing and exchange was "deceitful" and the problem was to explain why the weakening of Confucian ethical bonds was a "good thing." The editors of this book did not provide a master list to help us understand which economics texts were translated into Japanese and in what date. However, it is made clear that Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations (1776), Francis Wayland's The Elements of Political Economy (1837), John Stuart Mill's Principles (1848), and many other staples were available in translation by the middle of the 19th century.
From the descriptions of what the Japanese economists took away from these texts, it is clear that the absence of a clear understanding of "civil society" - that is, a sphere of liberty separating the family and the state - may have prevented an in-depth understanding of the subtleties of the emerging classical political economy. I say this despite Ukichi Taguchi's (1855-1905) early efforts to introduce something of the free-trade laissez-faire tradition. Professor Satoshi Niimura offers evidence of this point (p. 120).
The great industrialization debate of the 1890s led the Japanese to admire and emulate Germany. Germany was a latecomer to European industrialization but wasted no time in catching up. Japan could do the same. From Tokyo University scholars were dispatched to Germany to study with Professors Adolf Wagner (1835-1917), Gustav von Schmoller (1838-1917) and other Historical School economists. Their instructions were to bring back the best of German economic thinking. These Japanese overseas students brought back to Japan many riches including the new social welfare policies that characterized the Vereins fur Sozialpolitik. The "common understanding of the social policy school [now transplanted in Japan] was that if the government established laws and prepared social systems according to necessity based on a policy of social improvement, labor problems could be prevented and resolved even in a system with private ownership" (p. 49).
The Meiji authoritarian regime ended with World War I in 1918. Now began the exciting Taisho democratic era in which two German Historical School-trained Japanese economists, Tokuzo Fukuda (1874-1930) and Hajime Kawakami (1879-1946) advocated reforms needed to move Japan toward industrial democracy. Kawakami brought some of E.R.A. Seligman's writings back as well, but turned more and more to a version of orthodox Marxism and the theory of class conflict. Fukuda was staunchly anti-Marxist and did not fear competitive markets. Neither academic was successful at reforming feudal-style Japan. "Neither could accomplish their task due to the severe political tensions of the day" (p. 74). These tensions included the peculiar variant of Japanese capitalism in which the "nation's bourgeois form[ed] cosy relationships with the old powers, and [this created] a sort of nationalist-led capitalism [with] distorted relationships and a feudalistic structure" (p. 78).
During the 1930s, various intellectuals shifted attention away from Germany toward Russia and adopted the Marxist-Leninist literature. The Koza-ha tradition argued that "forced industrialization by the state is a proper way to achieve modernization" (p. 93). The Rono-ha factions valued the "general development of Japanese capitalism far more than the Koza-ha" and was comfortable with the idea that Japanese imperialism/colonialism was only the natural outcome of Japanese capitalism. This exciting intellectual debate ended with the arrest of members of the Koza-ha in 1936, and the Rono-ha in 1938 (p. 80). The Fascist party in Japan did much to stifle economic thinking in Japan, but massive arrests of Marxist economists only encouraged the Marxist revival after the second World War. "Marxian political economy" swept through Japanese educational teaching until at least the 1960s. After 1960, it became clear that the state monopoly capitalism description of modern Japan could not explain the post-war "Japanese miracle." Professor Toshio Yamada describes the revitalization of the Rono-ha tradition in the creative writings of the Marxist Kozo Uno (1897-1977), who founded what is known as the "Uno School." The hallmark of the Uno school is "political economy . . . constructed in a very systematic way from a pure and abstract theory into a concrete analysis of the real world" (p. 156). For insights about the modern-day Japanese growth miracle, the best place to look is in the writings of Hiroji Baba (1933-), who coined the phrase "companyism." A research program about companyism is still underway. Baba has tried to move the remains of the Uno school in this new direction of explaining the Japanese miracle.
