Shigeto Tsuru

Shigeto Tsuru (都留 重人, Tsuru Shigeto, March 6, 1912 – February 5, 2006) was a prominent Japanese politician and economist. He was widely honored for his scholarship, including the Presidency of the International Economic Association. He received several honorary degrees, including one of two that were ever given to a Japanese citizen by Harvard University.

Tsuru was born in 1912, the son of a Nagoya engineer-industrialist. While in high school in Tokyo he became politically involved in 1929–30, as a student leader in the "Anti-Imperialist Leagues", in activities against the Japanese military then in the early stages of aggression towards China. He was imprisoned for several months. Then expelled from high school, he was sent abroad to America to complete his education. His undergraduate work was at Lawrence College and the University of Wisconsin in Madison. His major academic studies centered around social psychology and philosophy.

His first major publication in a professional journal was on the subject of The Meaning of Meaning in 1932. In his junior year he transferred to Harvard where he took his baccalaureate degree in 1935 and his doctorate in 1940 in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He became one of the recognized intellectual leaders of the graduate student elite of the time like, Paul Samuelson, Richard Goodwin, Robert Bryce, Robert Triffin, Abram Bergson, John Kenneth Galbraith, Alan Sweezy, Paul Sweezy, Wolfgang Stolper, Richard A. Musgrave, Evsey Domar, James Tobin, Joe S. Bain and Robert Solow.

His pre-World War II published works in Marxian economic theory were regarded as particularly original and important an example being On Reproduction Schemes appearing in the appendix to Paul Sweezy's The Theory of Capitalist Development (1942). Schumpeter, to whose guidance Tsuru owed a great deal, discussed in his History of Economic Analysis the relation between Marx and Quesnay and wrote that on this subject "the interested reader finds all he needs in the appendix to Sweezy's volume by Shigeto Tsuru." Tsuru was actually one of the leaders in the founding of Science & Society - a Marxian quarterly.

Shigeto Tsuru married Masako Wada in June 1939. She was a daughter of prominent Dr. Koroku Wada (who later became President of the Tokyo Institute of Technology), who was himself brother of Marquis Kido, Lord Keeper of the Privy Seal of Japan. The Kido family were descendants of the Three Architects of the Meiji Restoration. Together they had three daughters.

Several months after Pearl Harbor Tsuru and his wife were repatriated as enemy aliens and went back to Japan where he founded a business college,(later Hitotsubashi University), of which ultimately he became President. In 1944 he was drafted into the Japanese army but after three months was discharged and invited to join the Foreign Office. What role he played there is not known, but records show that he was sent to the Soviet Union in March 1945, and returned to Tokyo at the end of the May air raids on that city. The train services had stopped and he had to walk the last mile to his home. When he got there he discovered that his home within the Kido family complex had been virtually spared. The role of Marquis Kido to stop the war is well known but what is not well known is that Tsuru lived in the same house as Marquis Kido, and observed all major Japanese developments at a nose length. During the occupation, Tsuru served first as an economic adviser to the Economic and Scientific Section of the Supreme Commander of the Allied Powers. Then, during the brief Socialist coalition administration of the Prime Minister, (Tetsu Katayama), Tsuru was made vice-minister of the Economic Stabilization Board 1947 at the age of 35. His work is best known for drafting the Economic White Paper of 1947.

After the occupation and stabilization of Japan he rejoined the faculty of Hitotsubashi where he founded the Institute of Economic Research. When he eventually retired in 1975 he had published 12 volumes in Japanese and one volume containing one third of his many English essays, seven books originally published in English, his Australian Dyason lectures, and his Italian Mattioli lectures. Later he joined the Asahi Shimbun, a major Japanese newspaper, as editorial adviser for 10 years, and later joined and became a Professor in the faculty of International Studies at Meiji Gakuin University where he retired in 1990.