This essay explores a 1937 proposal to build a museum of economic history by Shibusawa Keizo ¯ (1896-1963) in light of the questions it raises for generating and disseminating "public" narratives from a "private" source. 1) Although in the end this museum was never built, Shibusawa's bold yet meticulous plans provide a glimpse into the fluidity of lines between conceptions of "public" and "private" in the early twentieth century, foreshadowing the renegotiation of such boundaries in the

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... ay. I would like to begin by offering a puzzle: Shibusawa's call to create an institution to educate contemporary Japanese regarding the dramatic economic transformations of the nineteenth century managed to avoid any use of the terms "capitalism" (shihonshugi) or "state" (kokka), otherwise commonly employed in Shibusawa's own day as well as our own. That the author of the document was the grandson of the socalled "father of Japanese capitalism," Shibusawa Eiichi (1840-1931), only makes their absence all the more glaring. Was this a rejection of the language of leftist debates then raging in the Japanese intellectual world? Or was it an implicit critique of the claims of capitalism to encapsulate the range of recent transformations, and an attendant refusal to grant the "state" a monopoly on agency? As the problem lies in what Shibusawa did not say, rather than what he did say, we must turn to contextualization for an answer. This, I would argue, tips the balance toward the latter, though by no means rules out the former. Regardless, these absences have the effect of accentuating Shibusawa's actual choice of terms to develop his proposal, whose trajectories I trace in the pages that follow.