Professor Shinichi Ichimura: The visionary founder of the East Asian Economic Association

Professor Shinichi Ichimura passed away in Yokohama on July 5, 2024 at the age of 99. He was the founding father of the East Asian Economic Association (EAEA) in that he initiated the first meeting in Hong Kong to prepare for the association in 1984, together with other founding members. Later, Professor Ichimura became the first Editor of the Asian Economic Journal from 1987 to 1993, hosted the first international convention of the EAEA in Kyoto, Japan in 1988, and then became the second President of the EAEA in 1992, leading it until 2002. Professor Ichimura wrote a memorandum about his works and activities on several occasions by himself (Ichimura, 2022; Ichimura, 2023) and also left interview records on multiple occasions (Mieno, 2016; Movshuk et al., 2016). With the help of these documents, we would like to look back over his academic activities before, during, and after his involvement with the EAEA, and to re-appreciate what he aimed to do and actually did for the EAEA. Professor Ichimura was born in Kyoto, Japan, on March 30, 1925. After an early graduation from Kyoto First School of Commerce in December 1941 when the Japan-U.S. War erupted, he entered Osaka College of Foreign Languages (Department of Malay Language) in April 1942. After again an early graduation from the College in September 1944, he was mobilized for military service in October 1944 and made an army lieutenant in August 1945 just before Japan surrendered to the United States (CSEAS, 2016). De-mobilized in November 1945, Professor Ichimura entered the Faculty of Economics, Kyoto Imperial University (present Kyoto University) in April 1946, which came under the strong influence of Marxist economics just like in many other major universities in Japan then. He visited Professor Yasuma Takata (1883–1972), who was regarded as one of the fathers of modern (as opposed to Marxist) economics in Japan, and was deeply impressed. One year later, he decided to study under the guidance of Professor Hideo Aoyama (1910–1992). Professor Aoyama, being himself a student of Professor Takata in Kyoto Imperial University, also taught Professor Michio Morishima (1923–2004) and many other distinguished (modern) economists thereafter. After graduation in 1949, Professor Ichimura had an academic position at Wakayama University but, with the GARIOA fellowship of the US government, he pursued graduate studies at Columbia University in 1950 and then moved to MIT to get his PhD degree under the guidance of Professor Paul Samuelson (1915–2009), with his dissertation, An inquiry into non-linear macro-dynamic theories of economic fluctuations., in 1953. Thus, Professor Ichimura started his academic career with an interest in mathematical economics, including consumer surplus and non-linear theories of economic fluctuations, and he produced numerous publications both in English and Japanese in the 1950s. In 1956, he moved to the Faculty of Economics, Osaka University, more specifically to a social and economic research laboratory attached to the Faculty. The laboratory was founded by Professor Takata in 1951 and later became the Institute of Social and Economic Research (ISER), Osaka University, in 1966. In 1959–1960 he was invited to lecture on mathematical economics at Johns Hopkins University and then was elected as a Fellow of the Econometric Society in 1963 in recognition of his academic contribution to mathematical economics. During his 12 years at Osaka University, Professor Ichimura shifted his interest to empirical studies of the Japanese economy. He joined in a government project on the I-O Table for Japan and published The Structure of the Japanese Economy (1957). In the 1960s, with a research grant by the Rockefeller Foundation, Professor Ichimura started a big project to construct a large-scale macro-econometric model of a national economy, devoting his energy to the estimation of the Osaka ISER model of the Japanese Economy under the guidance of Professor Lawrence R. Klein (1920–2013). Over this period, Professor Ichimura also taught at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1967–1968, and at the University of Pennsylvania in 1968–1969. The outcome of the model was made available later as Macroeconometric Modeling of Japan (Ichimura & Klein, 2010). In 1967, two professors (one an expert in Mongol History, the other in Politics) from Kyoto University visited Professor Ichimura and asked him to become director of a rather newly founded (in 1965) multi-disciplinary research institute for Asian Studies of Kyoto University. While he chose economics in his youth to contribute to help Japan recover from its postwar misery and, after the postwar rapid growth of Japan, nurtured some interest in economic development and nation building in general at Osaka University, Professor Ichimura had to make a big decision not only to “switch his research area from Japan to Asian countries” and to discontinue “a standard trajectory as an economist”, but also to manage and govern a research organization not just for economics but for area studies comprising multiple disciplines at the age of 43 (quotes are taken from Mieno, 2016 in this section). Area studies had been strategically organized in the United States in order to provide an intellectual basis for foreign policies, including how to manage relations with postwar developing countries during the Cold War era, which reminds us of the research department of Manchurian Railway in prewar Japan. The Rockefeller Foundation had taken a leading role to build research institutions for area studies since the 1950s in the United States. Meanwhile the 1960s are well-known to be the heyday of student protests in many developed economies, including Japan, in opposition to the United States and its Vietnam War. The “leftist” students' protest paralyzed not only classrooms but also university governance all over Japan, and Kyoto University was no exception. In fact, it was the central location, particularly in the late 1960s. Nevertheless, Professor Ichimura thought that “political economy required due attention, but our interests in Southeast Asia and China went much broader and long-lasting.” Toward the end of 1968, Professor Ichimura left the ISER, Osaka University, with only 3 years' residence under its new name there and joined the another newly-established Center for Southeast Asian Studies (CSEAS), Kyoto University, where he was elected to be its director in 1969, a position he remained in for 10 years. The students and “extremely leftist faculty members” protested particularly fiercely against the donation by the Rockefeller Foundation, a symbol of the United States, to the new research center for Southeast Asia and criticized three right-wing professors closely related to the Center including Professor Ichimura. As it turned out, in order to compromise with these protests and criticisms, Kyoto University broke up the already concluded donation contract and returned the second half of the donation without the consent of the director, Professor Ichimura. Of course, he was furious and made every effort, and eventually, with the support of the business world in Osaka, successfully regained a substantial part of the donation from the Foundation. Apart from its US-style geopolitical nature, area studies at CSEAS started in such broad fields as human and social sciences and natural ecology, emphasizing contemporary rather than historical studies and field surveys rather than textual reading. Along with these research principles, Professor Ichimura as the director selecting agronomy, ecology, sociology, anthropology, economics, and political science as essential fields, successfully expanded the organization in size and budget rapidly in the 1970s. He wrote that he learned a lot on research management when he visited more than 10 well-known research institutes for developing economies around the world before taking his position (Ichimura, 2022). He recruited a number of new research staff and sent them abroad (mainly Europe and the United States) to pursue PhD degrees in those fields by using the donation he obtained. Professor Ichimura started his own research on Asian economies at CSEAS from scratch, that is, first, data collection in national income accounts and input–output tables in Southeast Asia and, second, microeconomic surveys across rice-growing village economies, since he found that both materials and methods were in poor conditions for empirical studies of these countries. In the process of help building economic statistics infrastructure of Indonesia, he was introduced by then Minister Widjojo to some “Berkeley Mafia” ministers as well as Dr. Sumitro Djojohadikusumo (1917–2001) in 1969, who was the guru of Indonesian economists (Ichimura, 2016) The microeconomic survey was later extended to a study on the management style of Japanese firms across Asian economies, provoked by the harsh anti-Japanese demonstrations that erupted during Prime Minister Tanaka's visit to Southeast Asia in 1974. Against a single person's careful observations of village life over a long period as often seen in conventional area studies, he tried to find an alternative way to “aggregate” observations and generalize them beyond case studies. He also believed that CSEAS should establish institutional objectives and missions rather than individual or small-group researches based on individual interests. In the early 1980s, when the Vietnam War and the Cultural Revolution were in the past, Professor Ichimura decided to get together with fellow economists to form a professional association in Asia to promote economic research by Asian researchers themselves on Asian economic development. He felt that Asia lacked its own intellectual infrastructure in economics within the region to promote these countries' development and nation building, although it had a number of scholars who studied and obtained academic degrees in advanced economies. To evade “some antagonism against Japanese initiatives” in Asia, he initiated the first meeting at the Chinese University of Hong Kong to discuss about the possibility of the association in 1984 (quotes from Movshuk et al., 2016 in this section). Among those invited, participants were Professors Edward K. Y. Chen, Steven Cheung, George Hicks (Hong Kong), Bon Ho Koo (Korea), Kuo-Shu Liang (Taiwan), Mahar Manghas (Philippines), Lim Chong Yah (Singapore), and Miyohei Shinohara (Japan). They agreed to establish a professional economics association on Asian economies in Asia, run by Asian economists as national representatives and to publish the Asian Economic Journal (AEJ). They also decided to hold biennial conventions and to issue the AEJ twice a year under a division of labor between print/distribution and secretarial work by Hong Kong (Chinese University of Hong Kong) and editorial work by Japan (Professor Ichimura). They also decided to recommend Dr. Sumitro, who could not come, as the first President of the EAEA, and he accepted it (Ichimura, 2016). The first issue of the AEJ was in March 1987. The first international convention of the EAEA was held at Kyoto University, Kyoto, Japan, (October 29–30, 1988). Six months before the convention, in March 1988, Professor Ichimura officially retired from Kyoto University and moved to Osaka International University as the Vice President in April 1988. Professor Ichimura succeeded Dr. Sumitro to serve as the second President of the EAEA for the years 1992–2000, presiding over five international conventions of the EAEA, at Seoul (1992), Taipei (1994), Bangkok (1996), Kitakyushu (1998), and Singapore (2000). Fund raising was an important part of the Presidency for such a young academic association as the EAEA to encourage participation by young scholars from developing Asia, his, and his successor Professor Yasuhiko Torii (1936–2019)'s contributions were enormous (Akiyama et al., 2020). In the meantime, the AEJ became quarterly, and was handled by the Wiley. In 1995, the city of Kitakyushu, Kyushu, Japan, invited Professor Ichimura to become the director at the International Center for Southeast and East Asian Development (ICSEAD), Kitakyushu, and he accepted it upon the condition of its institutional support of the EAEA. He directed the ICSEAD from 1995 to 2002, extending its network of researchers in Asian economies and internationalizing its research activities. ICSEAD, renamed as Asian Growth Institute (AGI), has continued to support the EAEA since then. In Autumn 2004, Professor Ichimura was conferred the Order of Sacred Treasure by the Japanese government. He was celebrated in Kyoto by his friends and scholars all over the world including Professor Seiji Naya (1932–2016), one of the founding fathers of the EAEA (Abe et al., 2016). Despite suffering from glaucoma, Professor Ichimura kept attending EAEA conventions until Taipei, 2018. In 2010, Professor Jang-Hee Yoo, then President of the EAEA, invited him to deliver one of the keynote speeches in the convention at Seoul National University, titled as “When and How Can Asia Play a Leading Role in the New World Order?” (Ichimura, 2011). He argued that, in order to do so, Asia needs to build the Asian Community beyond economic development and nation building. He admitted that we are still struggling with these latter two necessary (but not sufficient) conditions, so that there is a long, long way to go. In his interview in 2016 (Movshuk et al., 2016), Professor Ichimura emphasized that successful nation-building must guarantee the law and order, and the safety of citizens' economic activities, otherwise ‘polity subjugate economy’ as said by Professor Yasuma Takata. Particularly he worried about excessive optimism regarding the future of China. Looking back, the way Professor Ichimura took to study Asian economic development was far from straightforward. Professor Ichimura had been long known to be one of the provocative right-wing intellectuals in Japan, paying special respect to the Emperor system and being anti-Marxist. Founding fathers of the EAEA may have shared at least his nationalist sentiment in their own contexts of nation building. But no small part of Kyoto University had been critical against his nationalistic view. Moreover, Professor Ichimura was very confident in modern economics as a social science, as one of the first generation of economists in postwar Japan studying abroad, but he was rather new to Asian studies and critical of area studies' approaches. Despite his dedications to CSEAS, modern economics had not been well-accepted by many researchers in the other fields there. They studied Asia from their start, but were rather new to such a disciplined social science as modern economics. Many modern economics researchers left CSEAS in its earlier days. By contrast, the EAEA played a substantial role in attracting human resources in the field. Particularly, from the beginning, the editorial meeting for the AEJ provided an important platform of communications among economics researchers interested in Asian and other developing economies. Under Professor Ichimura's editorship, many economists read, examined, discussed, and evaluated articles submitted to the Journal around the table (of course, off-line by then) several times a year and this style continued until recently. Naturally, these economists have constituted the core members of the EAEA and their numbers are cumulating. Professor Ichimura wished that the EAEA had more members and convention participants in his interview in 2016 (Movshuk et al., 2016), agreeing that the EAEA should become more open to the world, expanding membership and research areas. Fortunately, we are realizing his wish in this post-COVID-19 period. Like it or not, as the Rockefeller Foundation had done, Professor Ichimura sowed seeds through the EAEA, Now, it is our turn to reap them. To conclude, we are truly grateful for what Professor Ichimura had done for the EAEA so far. Like him or not, he was a great teacher we owe a lot. We sincerely hope that he be in peace with his beloved wife, Yukiko, who had been together with him all over the world for 66 years until February 2022, conversing with us across conventions and other occasions.