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The founder of Meiji Gakuin University, Dr. James Curtis Hepburn, came to the island country of Japan during the last days of the Tokugawa Government, when the public mood was in turmoil. He won the popularity of the common people by providing them with free medical service, while his wife Clara opened an English academy and provided education services to young, future-oriented students. This school is the predecessor of the present Meiji Gakuin University, which played a vital role in Japan before institutions of higher learning had been established. The university has produced such distinguished people as Korekiyo Takahashi, who successively filled the posts of Prime Minister and Minister of Finance; Takashi Masuda, the founder of Mitsui & Co., Ltd., and the predecessor of Nihon Keizai Shimbun, Inc.; and Momotaro Sato, who established a department store. The Department of Commercial Science at Meiji High School (as it was called under the old system), the predecessor of the Faculty of Economics, was founded by August Reischauer, the American Presbyterian Church missionary and father of Edwin Reischauer, the well-known ambassador to Japan. It was during the era when waves of industrial revolution swept toward Japan, which had just opened its doors to the West, and was in dire need of white-collar workers, who were the new urban middle class people. With such a history, the Faculty of Economics has adopted the motto of Meiji Gakuin University: "Do for others” since its foundation.
It is true that economics and business administration have developed as the study of “efficiently” maximizing earnings with minimum expense to the government, companies and households, “convenience” necessary for people's living, and “calculation” to quantify the value of goods and services. However, understanding the "self-interest" of the people, and how people interact with others, lies at the root of the thinking about these subjects. Social sciences, such as economics and business administration, consider people to be members of a civil society (i.e. the economic society), namely the citizens. This is in contrast to the humanities, which consider people as individuals. Although this assumes the “self-interest” of the people, it teaches that this alone does not form a civil society. For example, Adam Smith, the father of economics, points out the relationship between the “self-interest" of people and the “sympathy” of others, and teaches that citizens behave in a way that they can gain each other’s sympathy and strive to understand the behaviors of others. Smith explains that citizens are connected to each other by the “exchange and division of labor” relationship; in other words, they procure “every necessity and convenience of life” by offering to each other useful goods and services. More strictly, he says that civil society has a mechanism whereby even if one produces superior goods, one has to retreat immediately from the market if one cannot gain the “sympathy” of others who are the consumers.
Through the recent curriculum reform, the Faculty of Economics aims at teaching economics and business administration not just as a learning of “efficiency,” “convenience,” and “calculation,” but also by actually seeing, listening and thinking about the system of economy and organization of business management, while valuing its basics from the point of view of how students should understand themselves, and how they should interact with others as future citizens. For example, some characteristic research themes range from the relationship between the layout of a familiar convenience store and popular items, how to calculate the value of name brands, business management and urban policy for town revitalization, currency revaluation and the opening of a stock market in China, to environmental issues, such as the relationship between global warming and the cutting down of tropical rain forests in the Amazon River Basin. The Faculty of Economics encourages its students to think until they understand. Some field classes and seminars in nearby communities and in foreign countries are offered for this purpose. “Do for others,” while appealing to the self-interest of individuals. This is the motto of the Meiji Gakuin University, as well as the educational objective of the Faculty of Economics. We invite you to master the methods and abilities to realize how you understand yourself and how you interact with others by learning economics and business administration.
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