Saving for ‘My Own Good and the Good of the Nation'

Few today question the centrality of nation and nationalism in the development of the Japanese economy since the late nineteenth-century. As several excellent studies demonstrate, Japanese policymakers and economic thinkers have tended to reject the principal tenets of Adam Smith, David Ricardo and John Locke. Like other Asians and also continental Europeans, Japanese have generally been sceptical of the doctrines of laissez-faire and comparative advantage. They have been equally critical of the Anglo-American conviction that the ideal economy is one in which the individual freely pursues self-interest and maximises his or her material well-being. Beginning in the late nineteenth-century, Japanese leaders and economists gravitated towards the nation-centred ideas of Germany’s ‘historical school’, notably those of Friedrich List. List’s influential treatise, The National System of Political Economy (1841), first appeared in Japanese in 1889. ¹