IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/h/pal/palscp/978-3-319-76372-9_5.html
   My bibliography  Save this book chapter

Competing Priorities of Infrastructure Investment and Military Expansion in Late Meiji Japan

In: Confucian Capitalism

Author

Listed:
  • John H. Sagers

    (Linfield College)

Abstract

The slogan “rich country, strong military” (fukoku kyohei) famously guided modernization efforts in Meiji Japan, but debates among business leaders and government officials highlighted the contested nature of this formulation. This chapter examines Shibusawa Eiichi’s criticism of policies he saw detrimental to business interests including the transition of Japan’s currency to the Gold Standard and rapid increases in military expenditures, which came at the expense of civilian infrastructure investment. Feeling a Confucian obligation to remonstrate against mistaken government policies, Shibusawa consistently recommended frugality in spending to allow for increased investment in the conviction that a prosperous economy leads to strength where reckless militarism leads to a poor economy and needles hostility from potential trading partners.

Suggested Citation

  • John H. Sagers, 2018. "Competing Priorities of Infrastructure Investment and Military Expansion in Late Meiji Japan," Palgrave Studies in Economic History, in: Confucian Capitalism, chapter 5, pages 119-150, Palgrave Macmillan.
    • Handle: RePEc:pal:palscp:978-3-319-76372-9_5
    DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-76372-9_5
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    To our knowledge, this item is not available for download. To find whether it is available, there are three options:
    1. Check below whether another version of this item is available online.
    2. Check on the provider's web page whether it is in fact available.
    3. Perform a search for a similarly titled item that would be available.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:pal:palscp:978-3-319-76372-9_5. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Sonal Shukla or Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.palgrave.com .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.