Introduction: A Survey of Research on Early-Modern Japanese Financial History

At least as far as I know, there are no handbooks in English on Japanese economic or business history. Why? Because Japanese economic and business historians tend not to attach much importance to survey articles—especially those for non-Japanese audiences. Japanese researchers who write papers in English usually devote their time and energy to publishing their research in international journals, which makes writing English-language surveys of past scholarship something they are unlikely to pursue in earnest (although there are always exceptions).

At this rate, however, Japan could fall further by the wayside in the international research context as fewer and fewer researchers elect to analyze the country’s unique economic and business history. Many readers of this Introduction have probably already noticed how little variety there is among the papers and related literature written by Japanese authors on Japanese history and cited by foreign authors in their studies on Japan. In some cases, researchers abroad are even referencing decades-old English-language surveys of Japanese history. That tendency is especially evident in research on early-modern and Meiji-period Japan, where old studies that the Japanese-speaking community now considers outdated have continued to show up frequently in papers by foreign authors.

An international journal once asked me to peer review a paper on Japanese business history. When I looked at the paper’s citations, I noticed that it failed to reference several pieces of key literature in Japanese. I considered adding a comment to that effect, but I had to ask myself: Is it my place to tell researchers who are either non-Japanese or struggle to read Japanese to cite books that are in Japanese? If there were a Handbook of Japanese Business History or something similar, I would have at least been able to direct the paper’s author to that resource. (Incidentally, a Handbook of Japanese Business and Management does exist.) As things currently stand, though, establishing a clear baseline for scholars analyzing Japanese business history—a work or works that every researcher should have read at a minimum—is a challenge.

This feature project aims to help begin forming that type of baseline in one area by having researchers who specialize in finance-related business in the early-modern era of Japanese business history highlight the latest developments in the field and explain useful approaches to the available historical resources.

The reason that we chose to focus on the pre-modern and early-modern periods is the uniqueness of the conditions in Japan during that time frame: the years in question cover the reign of the Tokugawa Shogunate both before the “Western impact” hit and its immediate aftermath, a milieu involving social and economic structures that made Japan extremely distinctive in the global context. For the international research community, we believe that the early-modern period presents compelling research possibilities.

Unique topics do come with difficulties. In attempts to examine highly singular subject matter, the barriers to entry can be frustratingly high, particularly for non-Japanese scholars. Studies along these lines are also prone to criticism due to concerns about generalizability, with observers suggesting that the papers simply examine special cases and lack external validity. That is exactly why we need to develop a survey of past studies that could catalyze international collaborative research on the early-modern period. If we want to take the topic of financial transactions in the unique, unusual environments of Tokugawa-era and early-Meiji-era Japan and put it on the table for cross-border joint studies, we need to begin by explaining—in English—the unique, unusual structures of the times, the current state of research progress, and methods for actually analyzing the available historical resources.

Much of the existing research featured in this project is in Japanese. If a foreign reader were to try to go through the bibliography entries individually and locate each source, the costs would be enormous. What we want to do is make it easier for all readers—even those who have no interest in learning Japanese—to at least have a basic grasp of how past research on the topic has progressed to this point.

Suppose that foundation helps scholars abroad uncover exciting research questions. In that case, we hope they reach out to Japanese business historians and other Japanese scholars with knowledge of the field about working on collaborative studies. That process, we believe, will make the field of early-modern Japan a vibrant research area with both an element of uniqueness and a regional—and time-spanning—universality.

All in all, I hope that our project sparks compelling research on Japan and brings scholars together in cross-border collaboration.