Review of Janet Hunter, ‘Deficient in Commercial Morality’? Japan in Global Debates on Business Ethics in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries. Palgrave Macmillan, 2016

Abstract

Amid the general explosion of interest in the place of morality in the global economy, recent scholarship on Japan has examined the emergence of a distinctively Japanese mode of business ethics in the modern era. A multiyear project sponsored by the Shibusawa Eiichi Memorial Foundation examined the efforts of the entrepreneur Shibusawa Eiichi (1840-1931) to develop a Confucian-inspired form of ethical capitalism. It resulted in the production of two volumes: one in Japanese published in 2014 and an English version published in 2017.1 Janet Hunter’s contribution to these volumes argued that Shibusawa’s ideas, while drawing on Japanese sources, were also part of an international discourse on the norms of commercial behavior that were sparked by the nineteenth century expansion of commerce in Britain and the industrializing West. A key concept in that broader discourse was “commercial morality,” a term used until the early twentieth century to describe what today is more commonly referred to as business ethics. In ‘Deficient in Commercial Morality’? Japan in Global Debates on Business Ethics in the