New Liberalism and Welfare Economics: British Influences and Japanese Intellectuals Between the Wars — Fukuda Tokuzo and Ueda Teijiro

Abstract

This essay focuses on two Japanese intellectual leaders of the Taisho and early Showa periods, a time when a form of ‘English Renaissance’ flourished among Japanese intellectuals. In these years a significant number of British intellectuals visited Japan: the Webbs in 1911, Lowes Dickinson in 1913, Bertrand Russell in 1921, and Seebohm Rowntree in 1924. During the years of so-called ‘Taisho democracy’ the works of William Morris and John Ruskin were widely read, and in 1923 the 150th anniversary of Adam Smith’s birth was enthusiastically celebrated in Japanese academic circles. In 1924 the birth of the first Labour government in Britain was warmly welcomed in Japan, and the Japanese Fabian Society was founded in the same year. During this time British influences were increasingly replacing the German influences which had been dominant in the Meiji period. Ueda Teijiro, who advocated the policies of ‘new liberalism’ and ‘practical idealism’, and Fukuda Tokuzo, who attempted to create ‘welfare economics’, were probably the outstanding academic figures, together with Kawai Eijiro (1891–1944), who represented British intellectual influence in this period.