Tameyuki Amano on Trade and Technological Progress

This open access book is a biography of Tameyuki Amano (1861–1938), who was the first Japanese economist. He was also an educator, one of the first elected Diet members, and one of the founders of the Tokyo Senmon College (now Waseda University). Moreover, as editor of the Oriental Economist (Toyo Keizai Shimpo), he was at the center of economic information and communication through his work that involved collecting economic and financial data and connecting Japanese economists and businesspeople. Amano wrote notable byline editorials on taxation, international relations and trade, monetary standards, banking, and stock exchange for almost every issue in the period 1895–1907. Amano spent his boyhood in Karatsu, on the northern shore of Kyushu, where the daimyos (lords) were associated with the Nagasaki surveillance mission. During the period of National Seclusion, Dejima in Nagasaki was uniquely permitted to maintain diplomatic relations with the Dutch; it functioned as a tightly controlled foreign trading post as well as a surveillance and intelligence system for the Tokugawa government. At Tokyo University, Amano attended lectures by Ernest Fenollosa on political economy, based on John Stuart Mill, and on the history of Western philosophy, based on Albert Schwegler. Amano later translated J. Laurence Laughlin’s 1884 abridged edition of Mill’s Principles of Political Economy and John Neville Keynes’s Scope and Method of Political Economy (1891).