ABSTRACT
There has been a sort of Adam Smith cult in Japan. On a fine day in the 1930s Professor C.R. Fay met two Japanese gentlemen on a street in Edinburgh. They asked him where Adam Smith’s tomb was, so he took them to the Canongate churchyard. To his surprise, they sat on the ground to bow down to the tomb to express their veneration, as if they were in a Shinto shrine. Despite their veneration of Adam Smith and British liberalism, the people of Japan, including the two gentlemen, could not prevent the Pacific War. Nevertheless, Smith has been studied continuously even under the militarist regime, the scholarship coming to a peak in 1941, just before war broke out. In spite of this tradition of Smith scholarship, almost all of his friends in the Scottish Enlightenment had been ignored. An apparent exception was David Hume, but he has been studied in the context of pure philosophy. Adam Ferguson and John Millar were mentioned by a few sociologists. William Robertson and Ferguson were discussed rather lengthily in Ken Chiyoda’s studies on the Historiography of the Enlightenment (in Japanese), published in 1945. This was the only exception to studying them as a group before Roy Pascal’s article on the Scottish Historical School (in the Modern Quarterly, 1938) was introduced by the author in 1956.
