ABSTRACT
Introduction With the end of its long period of national seclusion under the Tokugawa Shogu nate, lasting from 1639 to 1854, Japan was to see the onset of the ‘Meiji Res toration’ in 1868. The newly organized Meiji government soon set up a new educational system, adopting academic subjects, including Economics and Com mercial Studies, from ‘Western’ countries.1 Until the Tokugawa era (or Edo period), the higher education of commerce was not regarded as significant, however. But in 1862, the Japanese government was to send two scholars, Nishi Amane (1829-1897) and Tsuda Mamichi (1829-1903), to the Netherlands. They took private lessons on ‘economics’, ‘international law’, ‘national law’, ‘natural law’ and ‘statistics’ from Simon Vissering (1818-1888), who was the Professor of Political Economy at Leiden University at the time (see Morris Suzuki, 1989: 49). Vissering, the most eminent Dutch economist of his day, was a keen advocate of laissez faire (see Morris Suzuki, 1989: 49-50). After their return to Japan, they introduced the first ‘Western Economics’ in Japan – via Grondtrekken der Staatshuishoudkunde written in Dutch – the ori ginal version of which was Outlines of Social Economy (1846) by William Ellis (1800-1881), a British businessman and writer on Economics. This Dutch version was translated into Japanese by Kanda Takahira (1830-1898) in 1867 (see the chapter by Yagi on Japan in this volume, and Yagi, 1999). The significance of Dutch as the medium of the importation of Economics from the West, however, decreased over time. Instead, thereafter, Economics from the UK, the US, Germany and France was directly introduced into Japan (Tamanoi, 1971: 2-20). The notion of Economics, Commercial Studies and Management imported from the West was, however, almost alien to most Japanese people at that time. In such a situation and after the Restoration, the Japanese government, which was to send many lecturers to the ‘West’ and also employ foreign ones at home, attempted to establish educational institutions in order to teach these subjects and also to develop those who would be later engaged in business with the outside world.
