About Me
I am a financial historian affiliated with the Modern Japanese Studies Program at Hokkaido University. From April 2026 onward, I am also associated with the University’s Graduate School of Economics and Business Administration.
My research focuses on the history of finance in Japan and Asia, exchange banking, monetary systems, and the archival foundations of historical work. Alongside that, I have a longstanding interest in digital preservation, open scholarship, reproducible research, encryption, and privacy.
This site brings together some of my publications, current projects, datasets, and research notes.
Previous Positions
Before moving to Hokkaido University, I served until September 2018 as director of Digital Humanities and lecturer in history at the Graduate Institute in Geneva. In that role, I was also responsible for digital preservation and for curating a major collection of historical stock exchange quotes.
From 2011 to 2016, I was associate professor of financial history at the Institute for Advanced Studies on Asia at the University of Tokyo.
Books and Publications
Harvard University Press published The Money Doctors from Japan: Finance, Imperialism, and the Building of the Yen Bloc, 1895-1937 in 2012.
In 2020, Oxford University Press published Accounting for the Fall of Silver, a study of exchange banking practice in Asia after the monetary disruptions of the 1870s. The book grew out of extensive work in the archives of the Yokohama Specie Bank, especially the materials preserved in the Rare Materials Reading Room of the Economics Faculty Library at the University of Tokyo.
The book clears up a longstanding problem in financial history, first pointed out by Frank King in the 1980s but left unanswered for decades.
An extensive repository related to this research is available on Figshare. I also keep related methodological notes, source choices, calculations, and interpretations in the research logbooks on GitHub.
For journal articles and book chapters, please see my Google Scholar profile. The CV also includes working papers, preprints, and other unpublished work.
Current Projects
- A book manuscript tentatively titled Japan: A Thousand Years of Financial Innovation, which I hope will become a broad introduction to Japanese financial history.
- A study of the Jinkoki 塵劫記, growing out of a wider interest in the relation between vernacular mathematical education and the development of finance.
- Ongoing work on exchange banks and the late nineteenth-century fall of silver, including newly acquired balance-sheet archives of the Chartered Bank of India, Australia and China and the Mercantile Bank of India, London, and China.
Other Interests
Beyond financial history, I have long been engaged with Open Access, free and open-source software, and the long-term preservation of cultural and scholarly records. I have also done advisory work for international organizations, the arts, and small to medium-sized memory institutions working on sustainable preservation strategies.
Outside academic work, my interests include free jazz, record collecting, contemporary art, hardware hacking, knife forging and sharpening, the maker culture, and the Right to Repair.
CV and Contact
- Download CV
- Google Scholar
- Figshare
- Twitter / X
- Instagram (unrelated to research)
- Contact: michael.schiltz
@gmail.com
Favorite Quotes:
“Si hortum in bibliotheca habes, deerit nihil.” – M. Tullius Cicero in a letter to Varro (Cic. Fam. 9.4).
“Quemad viejos leños, leed viejos libros, bebed viejos vinos, tened viejos amigos.” – Alfonso X of Castile
“Sospechoso es el consejo del que induce y no peligra.” – Joaquín Setantí, Centellas (160)
