This open access book is a biography of Tameyuki Amano (1861–1938), who was the first Japanese economist. He was also an educator, one of the first elected Diet members, and one of the founders of the Tokyo Senmon College (now Waseda University). Moreover, as editor of the Oriental Economist (Toyo Keizai Shimpo), he was at the center of economic information and communication through his work that involved collecting economic and financial data and connecting Japanese economists and businesspeople. Amano wrote notable byline editorials on taxation, international relations and trade, monetary standards, banking, and stock exchange for almost every issue in the period 1895–1907.

Amano spent his boyhood in Karatsu (on the north shore of Kyushu) obliged with the Nagasaki surveillance mission. Dejima, Nagasaki was exceptionally allowed for diplomatic relations with the Dutch during the National Seclusion period and was a tightly controlled foreign trading post that also served as a surveillance and intelligence system for the Tokugawa government. At Tokyo University Amano attended lectures given by Earnest Fenollosa on political economy, based on John Stuart Mill, and the history of Western philosophy, based on Albert Schwegler. Amano translated J. Laurence Laughlin’s abridged edition (1884) of Mill’s Principles of Political Economy and John Neville Keynes’ Scope and Method of Political Economy (1891).

Aiko Ikeo has been studying the history of Japanese economics and economic thought for more than three decades, and the history of international economic policy in East Asia for more than two decades. She is a professor of economics at Waseda University, Tokyo, from April 2000. She edited Japanese Economics and Economists since 1945 (Routledge, 2000) and Economic Development in Twentieth Century East Asia (Routledge, 1997). She published A History of Economic Science in Japan (Routledge, 2014) and Globalization Reconsidered (in Japanese, Soseisha, 2017). She wrote “Japanese Women’s Economics, 1818–2005” for The Routledge Handbook of the History of Women’s Economics Thought edited by Kirsten Madden and Robert W. Dimand (Routledge, 2018). Her biography titled Tameyuki Amano: The First Economist in Japan (in Japanese) was published by Minerva Publishing (Kyoto) in 2023.