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At a time when the production and publication of "big biographies" has become apparently rare, we are fortunate that the Harvard University Asia Center has seen fit to publish Richard Smethurst's much-anticipated biography of Takahashi Korekiyo. The product of some twenty years of interest, research, and consideration, Smethurst's ruminations upon the troubled economic history of Japan in the 1930s repeatedly led him to consider the merits and deeds of its most enigmatic finance minister (p. vii) and, in doing so, to discover a most remarkable life. And Takahashi Korekiyo, the houseboy, indentured servant, and manager of a failed Peruvian silver mine who became the imperial Japanese government's financial commissioner, president of the Yokohama Specie Bank, governor of the Bank of Japan, decorated peer, prime minister, and long-serving (seven-time) minister of finance, is certainly a remarkable and noteworthy individual in Japanese, if not world, history.
The book is divided into thirteen chapters, conceived thematically, as much as chronologically, to reveal "important" episodes in Takahashi's life, from his remarkable beginnings in the 1850s to his violent end in the intrigues of the decadent 1930s. Fittingly, matters of economy and finance are accorded greater significance than others. In this connection, Smethurst discusses...