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Japanese economic historian Otsuka Hisao (1907–1996) was the founder of the Otsuka School of Economic History, which represents a convergence of Marxism and the sociology of Germany’s Max Weber. The focal point of Otsuka’s studies was the analysis, from an Asian standpoint, of the development of modern capitalism and the transition from a semi feudal society, as occurred in Japan, to capitalism. His studies were designed to provide a theoretical basis for understanding the distortions in Japanese political development that led to the country’s ill-fated military adventures before World War II (1939–1945). In his university days, Otsuka came under the influence of Japanese religious philosopher Uchimura Kanzo and was converted to Christianity, which informs much of his scholarship. Otsuka served as a professor at Hosei University, Tokyo Imperial University, and the International Christian University in Tokyo.

Otsuka’s scholarly studies went through five phases. His early studies are explored in his first book, On the Category of So-called Early Capital (1935), which describes the transformation of mercantile and usury capital common in underdeveloped societies to industrial capital found in advanced economies. In the second stage, Otsuka sought to establish the evolution of modern industrial capital by analyzing English economic history. In Preface to the Economic History of Europe (1938), he used the case study of weaving and textile making in English villages, towns, and manors to examine the reasons for the successes of the Industrial Revolution in England. He continued his studies on the genesis of capitalism in The Ancestry of Modern Capitalism (1946). Before the third stage of his studies began, Otsuka became an admirer of Max Weber’s classic The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1904), and he produced The Position of Commerce in the History of the Development of Capitalism (1941) and its sequel, Introduction to the Economic History of Modern Europe (1944). Otsuka pursued these ideas in two more books, The Ancestry of Modern Capitalism (1946) and Religious Reform and Modern Society (1948), in which he offered his own insights into the nature of not only Western forms of capitalism but also the Japanese state, which was becoming more hostile to liberal ideas.

In his fourth period, Otsuka concentrated on the intersection of economics and politics. In his Basic Theory of the Kyodotai (1955), he used the peculiarly Japanese concept of kyodotai (community) to investigate the basic processes that facilitate the division of labor in an economic society, along with the resulting emergence of economic classes within a primitive community. Here he reflected the ideology of the prewar communist faction, the Kozaha. In the 1960s, as he was nearing retirement, Otsuka was heavily involved in the protest movements against the United States–Japan Security Treaty. During this fifth phase, he published Religious Reform and Modern Society (1961), in which he combined German revolutionary philosopher Karl Marx’s concept of alienation and Weber’s concept of domination to produce a withering critique of the ossified bureaucracy that dehumanizes modern society. In The Method of Social Science (1966), Otsuka applied sociological analysis to the development problems of the third world.

Otsuka’s last book was The Spirit of Capitalism: The Max Weber Thesis in an Economic Historical Perspective (1976). His complete works were later published in ten volumes.

Bibliography:

Otsuka Hisao. Collected Writings of Otsuka Hisao. Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1986.
Max Weber on the Spirit of Capitalism. Chiba, Japan: Institute of Developing Economies, 1976.

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