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Fukuda Shozo, With Sweat and Abacus Economic Roles of Southeast Asian Chinese on the Eve of World War II, translated by Les Oates from the Japanese, edited by George Hicks, Singapore: Select Books, 1995. 284 pp. (Review reprinted from Eastern Express).
It must be exciting indeed to obtain a rare publication, albeit in Japanese and on microfilms and to have translated it into English, making available to specialists and general readers alike a unique field of knowledge.
With Sweat and Abacus. Economic Roles of Southeast Asian Chinese on the Eve of World War II, on the tremendous economic progress made by Chinese immigrants to Southeast Asia during the 19th century and the early 20th, was written by Fukuda Shozo (died 1973). It was originally published in Tokyo in 1939 with a third edition printed in 1942.
"Thanks to Fukuda Shozo," writes the noted Australian scholar Jamie Mackie in the introduction to this English translation, "we know more about the role of the Chinese in the economic life of Southeast Asia in the 1930s than we know of their role in the 1990s." The fact remains that after reading Shozo's work, we should know quite a bit more about the Chinese in Southeast Asia than merely their economic role.
It is known that Fukuda Shozo had spent four years in Shanghai from 1933 to 1937, researching and writing this book. After its completion, he was made Director of the Third Research Committee of the Toa Kenkyujo (Third Research Institute) to ferret out information on anti-Japanese activities among the Chinese in Southeast Asia, but Shozo also paid attention to Chinese economic relations between the mainland and Southeast Asia. Little else is known about Shozo, except that from 1938 until his death, he taught at Chuo University in Tokyo.
Perhaps due to wartime conditions, the quality of the paper of the 1942 edition was inferior. During the intervening years, fewer than a handful of copies survived, but it was learned that the brittleness of the paper would not withstand photocopying, which is extremely harmful to the original. Ramon Myers, Curator of the East Asian Collection in the Hoover Institution at Stanford, came up with the brilliant idea of microfilming the book. Les Oates, a specialist in the field and a Japanese linguist at Melbourne University, translated the work into English.