Hamilton Inspiration for Japanese Economy in the 1860s

• published: 04 Mar 2015
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Shocking as it seems, the nation of Japan is the greatest living "success story" today of Alexander Hamilton, Friedrich List, Henry Carey, and the American System of Political Econo­ my. It is Hamilton's success, in Japanese form, which has come back to haunt a United States now grown weak and decadent by its rejection of Hamilton's programs. Despite ignorance of most Americans and Japanese today of the facts, modem Japan was founded when a handful of Japanese intellectuals, lead by Yukichi Fukuzawa, Toshimi­ chi Okubo, and Shigenobu Okuma, created an American System Renaissance in Japan in the 1860s and 1870s, mod­ eled on Abraham Lincoln's programs. Traveling to the Unit­ ed States, Germany, and Europe, and bringing back with them American advisers and professors, this Japanese elite based themselves explicitly on the writings of Hamilton, Friedrich List, and Henry Carey. They adopted List's term "American System" for their plan to promote national industrial production, technology, and the elevation of the common man through education.List and Carey were widely translated into Japanese."America is our Father," wrote Fukuzawa in his newspaper. Without the "U.S.A. as chaperone of Japan," Japan might have been just another colonial satrapy, wrote Okuma in his Fifty Years of the New Japan.