ABSTRACT
The project, which has resulted in the publication of this book, started with the limited aim of exploring how the Japanese “mathematical economists” began to publish scientific papers one after another in renowned economics journals like Econometrica in the 1950s. Why could they write scientific papers in economics just a few years after the conclusion of the Pacific Campaign? It is because they read every issue of internationally oriented economics journals from around 1930 on and they published journal articles in Japanese which should have received attention if they had been written in English or German. They were naturally using mathematics when they consider questions of capital interest, imputation, and the estimation of demand curves for rice. In the early 1940s, their independent research was halted when Japan was losing the war. After the ceasefire of August 1945, surviving students and professors returned to schools and soon resumed education and research in the remaining buildings, looking for a brighter future for Japan.
