Dazai Shundai

• Born: 1680
• Died: 1747
• Japanese: 太宰春台 (Dazai Shundai)

Dazai Shundai was an Edo period scholar, generally identified as the first to advocate a distinction between moral and economic thinking, and to suggest direct government support for commercial and productive enterprises. He was a student of Ogyû Sorai.

His most famous work is perhaps the Keizairoku, published in 1729, but these ideas, in which he advocates for domainal governments to buy up useful goods produced within the domain, at a fair price, to then resell both locally and at the markets of Osaka, Kyoto, and Edo, do not appear until the Keizairoku shûi. This latter document was written sometime in the early 1740s, but might not have been published until the modern period.

References

• Luke Roberts, Mercantilism in a Japanese Domain: The Merchant Origins of Economic Nationalism in 18th-Century Tosa, Cambridge University Press (1998), 199.