Ryotaro Shiba (1923–96) and the Call for Meiji Values in a Global Age

‘Globalization’ generally refers to the development that took place after the end of the Cold War in the early 1990s as more countries embraced free trade economics, leading to greater flows on a global scale of people, goods and money. Even before Japan was caught up in the wave of globalization, an internationalization program had been initiated from the early 1980s by the Japanese government in an attempt to ‘internationalize’ many aspects of Japan’s domestic systems, including rules and regulations, to reduce the ‘trade friction’ the country experienced with the USA and European countries following the ‘economic miracle’. Although there are authors who make a distinction between ‘internationalization’ and ‘globalization’ — the former is to be encouraged and the latter to be avoided1 — the two terms are often used interchangeably. Such is the case in the Japanese language as well, in spite of the fact that the formal translation of ‘internationalization’ is kokusaika and that of globalization is gurobarizeshon. In the literature discussed in this chapter, the terms have been interchanged unconsciously; when translating them into English, therefore, I have tried to follow the nuance of the terms as they were originally used in the Japanese language.