Paper short abstract:

In the history of economic thought, "East and West" examples in the spheres of exchange or accord of ideas can be of particular interest. Here Japan and Poland; in both Marxism was greatly studied and debated during the early 20th century, when dealing with similar national and socioeconomic issues.

Paper long abstract:

Everything we find in our economic textbooks are ideas and theories greatly debated and contested during the past decades and centuries (even millennia). Why, how and where were those ideas developed? By who? Questions like that can help us see the world around us differently. They can help us study more deeply the formation and development of economic thought until today. And by knowing what has been said in the past, under which circumstances, the debates concerning critical economic issues etc. we can better understand the present and better act for the future. In this framework, it is important to get to know what the people of the biggest economies today, such as Japan or China considered as economics and economic policies in the past, but also to study them alongside the ideas developed in our "spheres of intellect".

In an 1934 article , Oskar Lange mentioned Professor's Kei Shibata (1933) theoretical research , as the first attempt to bridge the gap between Marxian economics and the general equilibrium theory. This simple reference, after a closer examination, shows that the cases of Japan and Poland, during the early 20th century, present some common points, which are interesting to pay attention to. Both those countries were dealing with the urge to organize, modernize and stabilize their nations, after important sociopolical changes took place. Japan was experiencing a rapid industrialization and transformation, after the Edo-period "isolation", and Poland was trying to find its new position on the "map", as an independent state "à nouveau" (despite of course each following a clearly different path). Moreover, in both those countries Marx's work was decisive in the evolution of intellect, especially in the formation of their particular economic thinking (thinkers like Hajime Kawakami and Oskar Lange studied the work of Marx and interpreted it in their own way). A joint study therefore, of such paradigms can let us examine those "contacts", their importance for the evolution of economic thinking, as well as the influence factors such as historical facts, geopolitical conditions, religions, customs etc. have on the formation of economic thought as such.

Paper short abstract:

On the material of the first comprehensive summary of European history produced in Japanese, this paper considers the process of encounter of two historiographies with their underlying interpretive schemes and conceptual vocabularies. It is an enquiry into the uses of the European past in East Asia.

Paper long abstract:

This paper offers a case study into the nature of adaptations and uses of the European past in East Asia at a time when the search for the knowledge of the West was not yet motivated primarily by any sense of its civilizational, moral, or technological superiority.

In the course of the later eighteenth century, as the Dutch philological expertise gradually became another available tool - alongside the long-established Sinological erudition - for generating knowledge about the world, commentators around the Japanese archipelago began to turn not only to medical or astronomical manuals of the Occidentals but also to their histories.

The translation-cum-commentary Seiyō zakki (Miscellanea from the Western Seas) by Yamamura Saisuke, dated 1801, is a case in point. The text became effectively a crossroads of two philological and historiographical bodies of knowledge that intersected in unexpected ways as European past was subjected to a reinterpretation in terms of the classical Chinese precedent while the product of that reinterpretation informed a different understanding of the recent and contemporary historical trajectory of a Japan exposed now to the dynamics of global European presence.

Retracing the steps of Yamamura as a student of European past requires us to consider how, on the desk of a Japanese low-ranking samurai scholar, Chinese dynastic histories and provincial gazetteers interacted with seventeenth-century commercial production of Dutch printing presses and German Lutheran writers' Biblical schemes of universal history. In Yamamura's summary, the Danielic scheme of Four Empires that served as the standard framework for Protestant universal historiography was subjected to a re-reading through the prism of an equally universalist Chinese historiography which conventionally contrasted periods of imperial stability with the fragmented periods of Warring Kingdoms. Following the defeat of the Qing empire in the Opium War, this interpretation of European past as a drift from ancient imperial unity to modern Warring-Kingdoms fragmentation would provide an explanation for the expansive presence of the Western powers in East Asia.

Paper short abstract:

Darwin's theory, Zeami's artistic understanding of 'hana', Ishikawa's method for total quality control, the educational approaches of J. Dewey, L, Vigotskiy and A. Makarenko, and the zen-Buddhist practices come together to suggest a new path to think on the nature of education in 21st century.

Paper long abstract:

How to educate answering the challenges of 21st century? How has the nature of education changed in recent years and how to be more effective in educating oneself or others. The paper presents an attempt to form a theory, called Conscious Education. The research belongs to the field of philosophy of education and rethinks the aims and methods to educate. It emphasizes on the involvement of all participants in the education process, and of the society where education is conducted and is based on the development of self- and environment-awareness in those. The theory relies on several well-known theories and approaches from various fields - Darwin's evolutionary theory, Kaoru Ishikawa's economy and management theory for Total Quality Control, Abraham Maslow's needs theory, Motokiyo Zeami's understanding of 'hana' as seen in Noh Theatre performance, the philosophy of educators like John Dewey, Lev Vigotskiy and Anton Makarenko, and the Buddhist understanding of smrti and samprajanya, as well as zen principles and practices. The theory is inspired by Japanese Studies development in Bulgaria, which has been thoroughly studied in the last 25 years and these form the concrete illustrations for class examples. Yet Conscious Education addresses a more fundamental question of how to educate in 21st century and what is education in the first place. How to make the individuals more aware of themselves and of the environment they live in, how to teach them to interact with other members in society and to be more effective in their efforts to excel. The Japanese intellectual thought is seen as a major resource-well thanks to the various approaches suggested by artisans, philosophers, educators, managers and alike through the centuries. These theories are applied to shake up the conventional understanding of education and to think holistically on the nature of education, the nature of educators and the nature of each learning human.