The Money Doctors from Japan: Finance, Imperialism, and the Building of the Yen Bloc

The monograph presents an historical-empirical inquiry into Japan's experiment with financial imperialism ('yen diplomacy'), more especially the activities of so-called money doctors in the official and semi-official colonies. It concentrates on authoritarian monetary reforms in and (abortive) lending schemes to 1) Taiwan, 2) Korea, 3) China and 4) Manchuria, at several key moments in the period between 1895 (the acquisition of Taiwan) and 1937 (the outbreak of the Sino-Japanese War); it addresses the question to which degree these reforms translated in a unified and sustainable strategic-economic nexus. The central objective is the analysis of the paradoxical simultaneity of 1) capital shortage within the Japanese economy and 2) the efforts to engage in (sometimes aggressive) capital exports to several Asian countries. The Money Doctors from Japan demonstrates that this paradox must be understood as the necessary outcome of the political choice for autarky. It explains, on the one hand, that money and finance, always coupled with the tools of scientific colonialism (land surveys, extensive research into opportunities for agricultural development and infrastructural improvement), were employed as powerful means for extending macro-economic control. On the other hand, it turns to polarities within the policy-making constituency. Differences with regard to style and tactics for achieving (relative) autonomy united certain policy makers against others; it created alliances between certain policy makers and certain bankers against other, similar alliances, and so on. Remarkably, it also mobilized monetary standards: gold as the metal of the pro-autarky group, versus silver as the metal of the more pragmatic-minded imperialists. In the end, all these highly complex policy stances and their consequences became the disaster of the Japanese empire. This project has been made possible by a generous grant from the European Research Council; Project Acronym: JapanGreatDepression, grant agreement number: 240854