ABSTRACT

While left-wing economists were contending with the problems of applying Marxian theory to the circumstances of post-war Japan, neo-classical and Keynesian theorists were acquiring a new position of authority and influence, both in academic and in administrative life. The reasons for the flowering of non-Marxian economics in Japan are not hard to discern. On the one hand, rapid industrial growth from the mid-1950s onwards sustained faith in the ability of capitalism to generate economic prosperity. On the other, the new political alignments of the post-war world brought Japan into the cultural orbit of the United States and ensured that US economic thought would have a particularly great role in shaping the ideas of a new generation of Japanese economists.