Japanese Economic History (1)

Author: (Japan) Fusao Tokiwa / (Japan) Masao Miyamoto, edited by Li Yiping et al.
Publisher:
Publication Date: 1997-11-01
Features: The Economic History of Japan, it can be said that this work represents a significant milestone in the maturation of quantitative economic history in Japan, also known as the New Economic History. After the publication of the 8-volume set, the academic review circles in Japan gave it high praise, calling this economic history "representing the current standard of quantitative economic history" and highlighting "many noteworthy arguments."① Undoubtedly, the broad content and specific issues addressed by this multi-volume economic history, spanning from the late medieval period to the contemporary era and covering nearly four centuries, will require in-depth academic research for review and commentary. This is not the task of this paper. As the supervising translator, here I would like to briefly review and introduce aspects of the growth process of the New Economic History in Japan as represented by the 8-volume set. Although the 8-volume set is titled The Economic History of Japan, it is not a comprehensive economic history of Japan; it examines merely the economic development of Japan from the late medieval period to the contemporary era, a span of less than four centuries. However, these four centuries represent a period of Japan's history with exceptionally rich content and intense transformation. The compilers limited their examination to these four centuries not only for this reason. A deeper reason lies in their long-standing systematic and in-depth research on the late medieval period, which revealed the intrinsic connections between Japan's pre-modern and modern societies. They convincingly grasped the late medieval, modern, and contemporary periods as a continuous whole, treating the late medieval period as the stage that created the prerequisites for industrialization, the modern period as the stage of industrialization, and the contemporary period as the stage of economic growth after industrialization. The significance of this holistic examination and coherent grasp lies not only in the innovation of the editorial format but, more importantly, in the unification of economic history and economic theory. The New Economic History is precisely the unification of economic history and economics. In Japan, economic historians and economists have traditionally been distinct disciplines. With the Meiji Restoration as a dividing line, there was a certain division of labor between the economic history of the late medieval period and the research on the modern period, with economic history being classified as a branch of history. This indicates that economic history and economics were actually separated. The long-standing, mutually closed division between them was only broken in the 1960s by the research of Japan's "New" economic historians, who applied quantitative data and quantitative analysis.