ABSTRACT

Many Japanese who would have liked to actively learn commercial policy and international business environment from the 1880s to the 1920s had read Tameyuki Amano’s books or journal articles on economics, policies, banking and savings, which included “Keynesian” macroeconomic arguments three decades before the publication of Keynes’s The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money (1936). This is the main reason why quite a number of Japanese naturally took up Keynes’s articles, pamphlets and books immediately after their publications. Keynes was one of the contemporary economists for the Japanese who were actively examining the international financial architecture and working on monetary economics and policies, and economic theories from around 1913 to 1941. Thanks to globalization, some Japanese had a chance to meet Keynes in Paris, Leningrad (St. Petersburg) and London, whereas no Japanese had ever met Adam Smith or Karl Marx. 2 Japanese economists and economics students read the writings of these authors for the first time only a long time after their publication.