From Foot Soldier to Finance Minister Book

This is a very interesting biography of a self-educated man who became fluent in English at a young age, was entrusted with governmental jobs at a young age as a result of his language skills, fell on his face several times (and was wiped out financially) but always picked himself up and moved on. He ultimately became vice governor, then governor of the Bank of Japan and from a time not long after the Russo-Japanese War until his death in 1936, Mr. Takahashi was seven times finance minister of Japan and once even its prime minister, although he was better at finance, where he was clearly gifted, than at party politics. It was especially interesting to read of his time in London and New York, where he went at the behest of the Japanese government, to raise loans to finance the Russo-Japanese War. While there, he began what evolved into life-long friendships with Jacob Schiff of Kuhn, Loeb and other leading financiers and learned much from them about how to make a proper request for the loans Japan needed and other useful information and ideas about the world of international finance, lessons he put to good use when he later became finance minister. Probably Takahashi's greatest claim to fame was his application of what became known as Keynesian economic principles -- before Keynes himself had even published his views -- to help Japan emerge more quickly from the Great Depression than any other industrialized nation. At the same time, however, militarism was on the rise in Japan and a conflict developed between Takahashi's ideas of proper economic development for the greater good of the country and the Army and Navy's desire for ever-increasing defense spending. Takahashi's opposition to such spending ultimately led to his assassination by a group of soldiers who burst into his house in the very early morning of February 26, 1936. I thoroughly enjoyed Prof. Smethurst's treatment of his subject. My only real complaint is a lack of information about Mr. Takahashi's personal life after he became a well-known government minister. How did he spend his spare time? What did he do for fun? With whom did he associate outside the work environment? What hopes and aspirations did he have for his four children? There is precious little information about these topics in the last half of the book but Mr. Takahashi was such an unusual and talented man, I'm sure even his private life would have been interesting to read about.