The central part of this book is an English version of the memoir of Masahiko Aoki that was
published in Japanese in 2008 ( ). In this memoir Aoki goes over his life as a young boy
immediately after World War II as an activist who opposed the rearmament of Japan under the
US-Japan Security Alliance as a student of Marxist economics first and then modern
mathematical economics as a graduate student at Minnesota as a young economist at Stanford
Harvard and then Kyoto as a central faculty member to develop comparative institutional
analysis at Stanford and as an institutional builder who established the Stanford Kyoto Center
the Research Institute of Economy Trade and Industry the Virtual Center for Advanced Studies
Institution in Tokyo and the Center for Industrial Development and Environmental Governance in
Beijing. Until now the memoir has been available only in Japanese and in Chinese. The English
edition will allow more young social scientists to touch the life and the work of Masahiko Aoki
and be inspired to make their own versions of the transboundary game of life.
