From a Reformist Professor to a “Mouthpiece” for Capital: Tsunao Miyajima in an International Context

Abstract

Tsunao Miyajima (1884–1965), qua economist, has gone unsung among historians of economics; however, his intellectual trajectory merits review in an international context. From the early 1910s to the middle of the1920s, he advocated the labor cause and social reform as a professor in Tokyo and Osaka. However, he converted his stance to its antithesis between the late 1920s and early 1930s, when he was acting as chief of the permanent Japanese employers' delegation to the International Labour Organization in Geneva. Observations on his volte-face, placed in the context of relations with famed economists at the time—such as Émile Waxweiler, Charles Gide, John Bates Clarke, and Gustav Cassel—provide insight to a significant episode in the internationalization and international networking in economics and, more broadly, in global intellectual history. Furthermore, particular attention to his objection to the “Eurocentric” organization's attempt to impose minimum wage fixing machinery on and allegations of social dumping in Japan, sheds new light on the international development of policy-oriented economics, namely from the hitherto unheeded perspective of an emerging economy from Asia.