HISTOR¥

Place and Date of Birth

3600 Genk, Belgium
November 30, 1972

Marital Status

Married; spouse: Sagawa Mikiko 佐川樹子 (Japanese)

Contact address

Home:
Baksteenkaai 26
B-1000 Brussel

Megata Tanetarō 目賀田種太郎 , sometimes (mistakenly?) referred to as Megata / Mekata Jutarō, was one of the first Japanese students at Harvard university, and one of the founders (together with Sōma Nagatane 相馬 永胤, Tajiri Inajirō 田尻 稲次郎, and Komai Shigetada 駒井 重格) of Senshū University.

A while ago I mentioned that Tatsuno Kingo's design for the Bank of Japan building may have been drawn after the model of the National Bank of Belgium (NBB)-this would mean that NBB emulation went beyond its organization and charter. Yet, that claim is contentious to say the least. I will therefore check the few works available on this influential nineteenth century Japanese architect: the 工学博士辰野金吾伝; 日本銀行図譜 (mentioned by Fujimori Terunobu 藤森照信 but I could not find any matches in NACSIS Webcat?!); and the recently published 東京駅の建築家 辰野金吾伝.

Something I should blog as part of this blogs potential for managing bookmarks: Albert Fishlow published a "Review of Alexander Gerschenkron Economic Backwardness in Historical Perspective: A Book of Essays" on the EH.net-website.

Added to the visual node: picture of JP Morgan

I am in Japan right now, and that is always a good opportunity to find research material I would not normally encounter through websearches. A great find is the recent and complete collection (the 決定版 in Japanese) of the works of Gotō Shinpei 後藤新平. Beautifully edited by 藤原書店, and published in eight volumes, they can be bought through Amazon.co.jp.

Maintaining a virtual museum is obviously the most 'bit-consuming' part of this Histor¥-project. I was therefore very happy to find (accidentally, through the Frog in a Well - blog) that the Kansai-department of the National Diet Library maintains a gallery of Portraits of Modern Japanese Historical Figures. Pictures are high-quality scans of photographs taken at the time. Also check the about-page.

To check soon: Muroyama Yoshimasa wrote a biography of Count Matsukata Masayoshi. Title: 「松方正義―我に奇策あるに非ず、唯正直あるのみ」. Published with Minerva Shobō.

Received through the sociocybernetics-mailinglist. Dirk Baecker on the memory-debate (edited by me):

"...memory has been an issue of continuing fascination for Luhmann, witness some papers that are, unfortunately, only published in German. The perspective chosen is a von Foersterian (or, even, Nietzschean): Why do people, and social systems, sometimes remember something? Why don't they just forget and continue their living and communication? The answer to that riddle is, that memory helps to remember how a possible future might by shaped - and that, in turn, gives the present some of its order."

Earlier, I referred to the importance of social darwinist and mercantilist semantics coinciding with the early reform movement (around 1868). I also mentioned the attention of the reformers for foreign learning in what they projected as the future pathways of the Japanese state.

Foreign experience most certainly helped the career of Matsukata Masayoshi 松方正義, who was to set the course of Japan’s finance for almost two decades (1881-1897). Of Satsuma stock and trained as an accountant throughout his samurai career, Matsukata had been the governor of a prefecture in Northern Kyūshū; he went to Tōkyō in 1871 to work at the Finance Ministry as deputy head of the tax department. In 1875 he was appointed as secretary and head of his department. At the time, he was in charge of land tax reform, transforming the system based on rice tax into a system based on money tax. In this capacity, he acquired extensive knowledge of financial affairs, and became Japan’s most enlightened financial planner of the nineteenth century.