Japan’s Higher Commercial Education Boom, 1875–1945

This book explains the fascinating history of higher commercial education in Japan; by “higher” commercial education, the editors mean an innovative, academic approach to the study of commerce in vocational schools designed to produce managers and leaders capable of navigating an increasingly sophisticated global trade system.

This volume first explains the European roots of Japanese higher commercial schools and how those early European schools began to influence commercial education outside Europe. Subsequent essays in the volume explain how Japanese students ended up in Europe (particularly in Antwerp) studying commerce, and how they brought back to Japan ideas about how European schools could be adapted to the Japanese context. More crucially, the chapters connect commercial schools operated by Japan in pre-war China to both higher commercial schools in Japan and Europe.

The book will invite some controversy because it sees the curriculum of the Tōa Dōbun Shoin as an innovative modification of the higher commercial school curriculum in late nineteenth-century Europe. Until now, the TDS curriculum has been seen as entirely “made in Japan.” In previous scholarship in English, the institution was viewed as an instructive example of Japanese imperialist policy toward China; in Chinese scholarship, an intelligence-gathering apparatus; and in Japanese scholarship, a creative and entrepreneurial endeavor by Japan’s “China hands” in the Meiji period. Thus, the book will probe a series of comfortable narratives that have gone undisturbed for decades.

Scholars have long been fascinated (and perhaps puzzled) by Japan’s breathtakingly rapid economic development during the Meiji period (1868–1912). This work on commercial education provides researchers with added context about that process. It will be of interest to scholars of business history specializing in Japan’s Meiji period, China’s treaty port economy, and nineteenth-century European business.