Historical studies in recent years in Japan

              Kojiro Nishikawa TOKYO, JAPAN
HISTORICAL STUDIES IN RECENT YEARS IN JAPAN
According to the recent membership roster of the American Ac-counting Association, Japan ranks third in number of members, next to the United States and Canada, surpassing other English speaking countries, including England and Australia. It seems then that Japan is among those nations where studies in accounting have gained great popularity. It is quite natural, however, that Japan, an impor-tant nation economically, ranks third in relation to interest in the study of accounting, since accounting is a necessary skill useful to business management.
Accounting Historians in Japan are likewise active in many areas of the history of accounting.
In 1973, Professor Osamu Kojima of Kansel-gakuin University published 150 copies of a facsimile edition of Pacioli's Summa de Arthmetica, Geometria, Proportioni et Proportionalita (1494). Kojima is now planning to issue 150 copies of a facsimile of Ympyn's work, A Notable and Very Excellente Woorke, (1547) with a supplement of exercises by Professor Basil Yamey.
A Tokyo firm has published 200 facsimile copies of Pacioli's De Divina Proportione, (1509). Another Tokyo publisher has issued Testamenti de Fra Luca Pacioli, arranged with the original on the left-hand pages and the Japanese version on the right-hand pages, accompanied by a short explanation by Professor Asahi Nakanishi. In addition, another author, a former student at Nikon University, has translated Pacioli's Bookkeeping Treatise and published it at his own expense quite recently.1 He used Brown and Johnston's Paciolo on Accounting as a model for his book, but has rendered it from the original Italian text of the first and second editions at-taching thereto a photographic reproduction of the original treatise of the second edition. Whether the accounting academicians of Japan will accept this work as another valid Japanese version of Pacioli's treatise is yet to be known. Furthermore, the Second Edition of Pacioli's treatise has been published in Japan for the first time.