Emil Lederer, Review of Weltwirtschaftliches Archiv (1938)

Emil Lederer’s journal review examines the July 1937 issue of Weltwirtschaftliches Archiv, devoted to Japanese economics through fifteen articles written mainly by Japanese scholars. His assessment combines appreciation of its empirical richness with criticism of its explanatory limits. The contributions illuminate population, agriculture, industrialization, credit, public finance, foreign trade, and rice-price regulation, but insufficiently connect these subjects to the distribution of social power or question the premises of Japanese foreign policy. Lederer’s central interpretive move is to bring wages, peasant incomes, and conflicting social interests into an account whose contributors often leave those relationships implicit.

The review begins by distinguishing overt imperialist apologetics from the issue’s more restrained economic scholarship. Lederer identifies J. B. Kraus and H. Kamikawa as the two contributors who explicitly advance an expansionist ideology: Kraus invokes a romantic Japanese spirit to justify purported national necessities regardless of other nations’ interests, while Kamikawa presents imperial ambitions as claims to justice. Lederer nevertheless resists treating the entire issue as propaganda. Most contributions, he argues, neither overstate Japan’s strengths nor exaggerate its difficulties. Yet acceptance of the conquest of Manchukuo among economists invoking access to raw materials shows how political assumptions can enter otherwise conventional economic analysis.

His discussion of population turns from national necessities to the actual absorption of labor. Professor Uyeda compares Japan’s difficulties with those of nineteenth-century Germany and Britain, but Lederer finds a tension between that interpretation and Uyeda’s evidence. Between 1920 and 1930, the increase of two million employed people was absorbed principally by commerce and public service, rather than industry and crafts. Technical progress subsequently increased industrial output without a comparable increase in industrial employment. This raises a question about the domestic conditions of development:

How far the lagging behind of industrial development is due to the low income of the peasants is not discussed.

The omission matters because Lederer repeatedly treats low incomes as explanatory variables, not merely as consequences of modernization. He also questions the credibility of the hope to settle one million families in Manchuria over twenty years, noting that other students of the subject scarcely share it. Population pressure thus does not, in his reading, establish the necessity or feasibility of territorial solutions.

The industrial papers document dependence on imported raw materials and a gradual movement away from textile dominance. They also recognize that expanding foreign trade enabled rapid industrial growth against the prevailing trend of world trade. Lederer’s objection concerns the weight assigned to the mechanisms sustaining that expansion:

The quick growth of industry and of foreign trade—the condition of this industrial expansion—against the trend of world trade, is sufficiently emphasized, but the importance of the wage-factor is given too little weight (p. 155).

This criticism organizes his treatment of credit and public finance. The contributors recognize both inflationary risks from rising public expenditure and the dominant influence of the state, large banks, and industrial concerns. Lederer adds that low wages and low farmers’ incomes helped contain the price effects of armament expenditure. Araki’s failure to give this factor sufficient attention, he argues, weakens the explanation of limited demand for private capital and the government’s ability to reduce interest rates.

The comparison with Germany clarifies Lederer’s emphasis on mechanisms rather than national character. German wages were restrained by decree; in Japan, abundant labor and falling rice prices prevented wage increases through market processes. Similar policies could therefore rest on different forms of wage restraint. Lederer also notes that this policy had limits, which the issue’s evidence suggested were being reached.

Rice-price regulation brings the conflict between agriculture and export industry into particularly sharp focus. Lederer praises Schuettauf’s account of government intervention during an agricultural crisis intensified by colonial imports:

The dilemma of a low price of rice or a decreasing real wage (the condition for expansion of exports) is clearly seen by the author.

Cheap rice could support workers’ purchasing power while maintaining low money wages, but threatened farmers’ subsistence. Supporting farmers through higher rice prices instead imposed pressure on workers’ real wages. Lederer concludes from the article’s evidence that policy favored agricultural support while labor remained constrained by abundant supply and weak employment demand resulting from mechanization. The apparent coherence of national economic policy thus concealed unequal burdens among social groups.

The concluding assessment extends this insight to the issue as a whole. Its contributions are not organized around a common analytical center, and the relations between economic data, social power, and foreign policy remain largely unexamined. Accounts of a “Japanese spirit” willing to accept a simple standard of living and sacrifice personal interests substitute collective sentiment for analysis of internal conflict. Taking foreign-policy aims for granted also excludes the question of peaceful economic expansion. Lederer connects these restrictions to the circumstances of scholars employed largely in state universities, while preserving a qualified judgment of the publication’s value:

To mention these points shows how difficult it is for a group of Japanese scholars, most of them in State universities, to avoid certain presuppositions; but within the limits set by circumstances, the publication is "objective" and the material presented is so rich that the reader can draw his own conclusions.

The review’s significance lies in this distinction between valuable evidence and restrictive interpretation. Lederer shows how the issue’s own material permits a more critical account of Japanese development: one centered on labor absorption, income distribution, mechanization, and the competing interests behind industrial and imperial expansion.