The Wealth and Poverty of Nations: Why Some Are So Rich and Some So Poor (W W Norton & Company; 1998)

JAPAN: AND THE LAST SHALL BE FIRST^363

townsman dismisses fame and makes profit. He amasses gold and sil­

ver. That is what he calls his Way."^13

That was the Way, and nothing must be allowed to get in the way.

Here is Mitsui Takafusa (1684-1748), third generation of the great

house of that name, still, after three hundred years, a major mercantile

power:

Never waste your attention on matters that have nothing to do with

your work. Merchants who ape samurai or think that Shinto, Confucianism

or Buddhism will preserve their inner heart will find that they will only ruin

their houses if they become too deeply engrossed in them. How much

more true is this of other arts and entertainments! Remember that it is the

family business that must not be neglected for a moment.^14

Again the parallel with Europe is striking. Japan did not have Calvin­
ism, but its businessmen adopted a similar work ethic. The key lay in
the commitment to work rather than to wealth. The Zen monk Suzuki
Shosan (1579-1655) saw greed as a spiritual poison; but work was
something else: "All occupations are Buddhist practice; through work
we are able to attain Buddhahood [salvation]."^15 One does not have to
be a Weberian Protestant to behave like one.
(Japanese scholars have noted that this work ethic was not universal
in time or space, but that the latter half of the Edo period was marked
by intensified labor and the propagation of work habits that stood the
economy in good stead once it moved on to modern industry. In their
words, an "industrious revolution" prepared the way for the industrial
revolution.)*

Meanwhile, in Japan as in western Europe, rulers had learned that
mercantile prosperity meant revenue and that revenue was convertible
into pleasure and power. Here the multinational model is relevant:
Japan was in effect a competitive economic world of over two hundred
fifty nations, all of them wanting more and many of them sorely want­
ing.
Nothing so concentrates the mind as lack of money. In the effort to
generate income over and above the rice stipends, daimyd began to
make improvements (roads, canals, land reclamation, irrigation, new
crops, and better strains of seed), or to promote specialization in trad-

* The inventor of the term, now commonly found in Japanese academic discourse, is

Professor Akira Hayami.