32 - Michio Morishima (1923–2004): An Economist Made in Japan

Summary

INTRODUCTION

IN 1942 a young first year economics student at Kyoto University, Michio Morishima, was tasked by his teacher with reading and engaging with the substantive work Value and Capital, recently published by the British economist Sir John Hicks. Reading this work, an activity later described by Morishima himself as a form of passive resistance to the wartime regime, helped to fuel a lifelong commitment to economic ideas and theories that subsequently led to Morishima's achieving celebrity status within Japan itself, becoming one of Japan's few internationally renowned economists in the second half of the twentieth century, and probably the closest Japan has yet come to having a Nobel prizewinner in economics. Yet Morishima as a child wanted to be a novelist, and was never comfortable with any narrowly defined or rigidly applied economics approach.

CAREER

Morishima was born in Osaka in July 1923. Graduating from elementary school in 1936, he progressed to high school, and from there to university, but in December 1943 he was conscripted into the Imperial Japanese Navy. After a year of training he was assigned to the communications section of a combat unit in Kyūshū, where he remained to the end of the war. Finding his way home amidst the disruption and despair of a defeated Japan, he was able to resume his studies in Kyōto, graduating with a Bachelor of Economics degree in 1946. It was apparent early on that his talents in the field of mathematics and economics were unusual. Working as research assistant, lecturer and then assistant professor at his alma mater in Kyoto from 1948, at a time when Marxist economics was particularly influential, he moved in 1951 to Ōsaka University as assistant professor, subsequently being promoted to full professor in 1963 at the age of forty. Although he had visited China, where his father was working, as a teenager before the outbreak of the Pacific War, chances for foreign travel in early post-war Japan were slim, but Morishima was given the opportunity to study abroad at a relatively early stage, spending the years 1956–1958 as a Rockefeller Foundation Fellow in Britain and the United States.