(Q74412806)
Statements
Ancesters at Home and Abroad (English)
Ian Buruma
30 March 1986
1 reference
Matsukata played an important role in the Meiji Restoration in 1868, the uprising that broke the grip of the Shogun's military dictatorship, which had held power for two and a half centuries. Afterward he made the sensible and, for the time, typical point that ''in order to negotiate with a foreign nation, the country itself must be in good order, with plenty to eat and plenty of soldiers.'' In 1878 he told the French statesman Leon Say that he was ''a great admirer of Adam Smith's laissez-faire economics, and hoped that the day would come when Japanese industry would be strong enough to make those policies feasible in his country - but protectionism was more appropriate for Japan at that time.'' His ideas evidently had a lot of staying power.According to Mrs. Reischauer, he was ''no champion of democracy.'' He ''viewed with repugnance the development of political parties and the eagerness of the lower house of the Diet to challenge the authority of the emperor's ministers.'' But as Finance Minister he set up Japan's modern financial system, with a central bank. And by 1900 he had controlled inflation and put Japan on the gold standard. (English)
1 reference
Arai was groomed to become an international businessman. He learned such essential skills as English composition. Admonished by his elder brother that he should ''go with great patriotic enthusiasm for the sake of your country,'' he left Japan in 1876 for San Francisco, from where he made his way to New York, as one of the first Japanese businessmen in America. He was impressed by New York, writing to his family: ''Although I don't know anything about Paris, I think it must be much inferior to New York.'' Arai began with a few silk samples in the corner of a friend's wholesale store, and he was jeered in the streets by the people Mrs. Reischauer calls ''native Americans'' (not recent immigrants, ''mostly Germans, Italians, Greeks, Jews, and Chinese'') who assumed he was Chinese (or, in the parlance of that time, a ''cunning, treacherous and vicious'' Asiatic). The only time the Japanese were respected was when they won a war. Arai wrote: ''The greatest moment in my life in America was when word came that the Japanese were victorious in the Russo-Japanese war. Then, all Americans were nice to us.'' At any rate, Arai ended up as an extremely wealthy silk merchant and pillar of the Japanese-American community, and he liked nothing better than a round of golf in Stamford or Greenwich, Conn. (English)