Industrial Revolution · CHAPTER 10 ·
Industrialisation of Meiji Japan
Chapter 10 of The Industrial Revolution, 1750–1914: “Japan: Industrialisation from Above”
After American warships under Commodore Perry forced Japan open in 1853–54, the Meiji government that took power in 1868 set out to make the country rich and strong. The state built railways and model factories such as the Tomioka silk mill (1872), and private firms such as the Osaka Spinning Company (1883) led the next phase.
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The map above is the world of The industrial world, 1910 — Japan’s industrial empire.
Part of IB History: The Industrial Revolution →
BRIEF EXPLANATION — THE ESSENTIAL ARGUMENT
Japan was the first country outside Europe and its settler colonies to industrialise, and it did so because its rulers decided that only industry could keep the country independent. In 1853–54 American warships under Commodore Matthew Perry forced Japan to open its ports, and the treaties of 1858 imposed low tariffs, or import taxes, and foreign courts on Japanese soil. These were unequal treaties, much like a contract one party is forced to sign under threat. Foreign trade began at Yokohama in 1859. After the Meiji Restoration of 1868, a seizure of power in the name of the young emperor Meiji, overthrew the shogun, the hereditary military ruler who had governed in the emperor’s name, a new government led by young samurai, members of the old warrior class much like Europe’s knights, set out to make Japan rich and strong. The state built railways and telegraphs, opened model factories for others to copy, such as the Tomioka silk mill of 1872, and hired foreign experts to teach their skills, because Japan’s leaders judged that a country without industry would be humbled as China had been by British warships.
Private firms then carried industrialisation forward, using cheap labour, much of it young women from farm families. The Osaka Spinning Company of 1883 proved that large steam-powered cotton mills could pay, and by 1897 Japan exported more cotton yarn than it imported, much of it spun from Indian cotton shipped from Bombay. Silk, reeled, or unwound from cocoons, by women in Nagano and Gunma, became Japan’s largest export and paid for imported machines, and heavy industry followed with the state steelworks at Yawata in 1901. On the map Japan turns from the blue of an opened economy to the grey-tan of an industrialising one, while Korea and Taiwan turn tan as Japanese colonies. Their land and labour were part of the cost of Japan’s rise, as was the poisoned river below the Ashio copper mine.
The full story
Japan industrialised because its leaders had watched what Western industrial power did to China and resolved to escape the same fate. The Opium War of 1839–42, which Britain fought after China tried to stop British merchants selling Indian opium, showed that steam-powered navies could humble the greatest empire in Asia, and when Commodore Perry’s American steam warships arrived in 1853 Japan had no answer. The commercial treaties of 1858, unequal treaties imposed under threat, opened ports including Yokohama, fixed Japan’s import tariffs low, at about five per cent from 1866, and gave foreigners their own courts; Japan regained full control of its tariffs only in 1911. After seizing power in 1868 the Meiji government abolished the domains, the semi-independent territories of some 270 feudal lords, each rather like a province with its own prince. Led by former samurai of the old warrior class, it created an army raised by compulsory service and taxed land in cash to fund modernisation. Its slogan was fukoku kyōhei, “rich country, strong army”, which made industry a matter of national survival.
The state led the first phase and private business the second, and the textile industries show how. In 1872 the government opened the Tomioka silk mill with French machines and a French engineer, Paul Brunat, and recruited young women to learn modern silk reeling, unwinding thread from cocoons, and teach it elsewhere. Railways followed, from Tokyo to Yokohama in 1872 and to Kobe in 1889. In the 1880s, with the state deep in debt, the finance minister Matsukata Masayoshi cut spending and sold most state factories to private firms such as Mitsui and Mitsubishi, which grew into zaibatsu, family-controlled groups spanning banking, mining, shipping and trade, much like South Korea’s Samsung today. The banker Shibusawa Eiichi’s Osaka Spinning Company, opened in 1883 with steam-driven spinning machines, became the model for private mills; on the map red patches around Osaka, Nagano and Gunma mark the new textile Japan. The state had taken the first risks, and private capital took over once those risks had been shown to pay.
Industrial Japan was built on the labour of young women and the resources of an empire, and the costs fell on both. Women made up about 80 per cent of textile workers, recruited from poor farm families on contracts, housed in dormitories and worked twelve hours or more a day; a government doctor, Ishihara Osamu, reported in 1913 that many went home with tuberculosis. Heavy industry needed coal and ore, so the state built the Yawata steelworks beside the Chikuhō coalfield, opening it in 1901 partly with the indemnity, a compensation payment forced on the loser, that China paid after the war of 1894–95. That war gave Japan Taiwan, and victory over Russia in 1905 gave it a lease in southern Manchuria and control of Korea, annexed in 1910; Japanese railways from Seoul and a colonial land survey tied Korea’s farms to Japan’s economy. At Ashio, copper waste poisoned the farms along the Watarase river, and the politician Tanaka Shōzō led the protests. Japan’s success was real, and others paid part of its price.
DEEP EXPLANATION — EVIDENCE & INTERPRETATION
How much did the state do?
Historians have long debated how much of Japan’s industrialisation was achieved by the Meiji state, the modernising government that took power in 1868 in the name of the young Emperor Meiji. The historian Thomas C. Smith’s classic study of government enterprise (1955) showed the state building shipyards, mines, weapons factories and model mills for private firms to copy when private capital would not, a pattern predicted by the economic historian Alexander Gerschenkron’s theory that late-starting countries need banks and the state to do what markets did in Britain. Later research has shifted the emphasis. Many state enterprises lost money and were sold cheaply to well-connected private buyers in the 1880s, and the industries that earned most of the foreign currency Japan needed for imports, cotton spinning and the reeling of silk thread from cocoons, grew through private investment, much of it in small rural workshops. The economic historian Penelope Francks and others stress the inheritance of the Tokugawa shogunate, the military government that ruled Japan from 1603 to 1868: national markets, merchant houses such as Mitsui (founded in 1673), and a population in which, by the sociologist Ronald Dore’s estimate, perhaps 40 per cent of boys and 10 per cent of girls received some schooling outside the home by the 1860s. The state’s achievement was to remove obstacles, build infrastructure and take the first risks. The momentum came from a society that was already commercial, literate and, crucially, willing to send its daughters to the mills.
The factory girls of Meiji Japan
Japan’s textile industry was built by teenage girls, and historians such as E. Patricia Tsurumi, in Factory Girls (1990), and Janet Hunter have reconstructed their lives. Most were teenagers from poor farm households, recruited by agents who paid their families an advance against future wages, which bound the girls to the mill until the debt was worked off. They lived in locked dormitories, worked shifts of twelve hours or more, and many fell ill; the government’s survey Shokkō jijō (Conditions of Factory Workers, 1903) documented the abuses, and the government doctor Ishihara Osamu’s report of 1913 linked the mills to the spread of tuberculosis in the countryside. The women resisted conditions they could not escape. In 1886 silk reelers, who unwound thread from cocoons, at the Amamiya mill in Kōfu struck against longer hours and lower pay, in what is often called the first strike in Japan, and the songs the workers composed survive as a source for their own view of mill life. Japan’s first Factory Act, passed in 1911 and enforced from 1916, limited the hours of women and children. Read together, company records, government reports and the workers’ songs show that debt bound the girls to the mills, and that this bondage was one reason Japanese yarn was so cheap.
Industrialisation and empire
Japan’s industrial rise and its empire grew together, and historians in Japan, Korea and the West disagree about how to weigh them. The indemnity, a compensation payment of about 230 million taels, a Chinese unit of silver, that China paid after its defeat by Japan in 1894–95 financed the Yawata steelworks and helped Japan adopt the gold standard in 1897, tying its currency to gold as Britain’s was, which made foreign borrowing easier. Taiwan, ceded in 1895, became a source of sugar, rice and camphor, distilled from camphor trees for medicines and early plastics. Korea had been opened by Japan itself in 1876, through an unequal treaty, one forced on the weaker side, modelled on those the West had imposed on Japan; it became a protectorate, a state whose government Japan controlled, in 1905 and was annexed in 1910. The colonial government built railways and ports, and its land survey of 1910–18 registered land in ways that dispossessed many Korean farmers, while rice exports to Japan rose most steeply after 1920. Some historians describe a colonial modernisation that left infrastructure and industrial experience behind; others stress that it was built for Japanese purposes, through coercion, and that Koreans resisted it. The pattern of a newly industrial power seizing colonies to secure raw materials and markets repeated, in Asia, what Europe had done for a century.
Key places on the map
Why it happened
The shock of Western power. Japan’s leaders watched Britain’s steam-powered navy defeat China in the Opium War of 1839–42, fought after China tried to stop British opium sales, and in 1853 the American Commodore Perry’s steam warships showed that Japan could not keep foreigners out. The unequal treaties that followed, signed under threat, capped Japan’s tariffs, its taxes on imports, and the reach of its courts. Many samurai, members of the hereditary warrior class, concluded that only an industrial economy could pay for the army and navy needed to escape China’s fate, which made industrialisation a matter of national survival. Fear of the West became the driving force of Japanese modernisation.
A state that chose industry. The Meiji government, the regime that took power in 1868, abolished the domains of the daimyo, the feudal lords who had ruled Japan’s regions, created a national army by conscription, compulsory military service, and a land tax paid in cash, and used the revenue to build railways, telegraphs, shipyards and model factories for private firms to copy. It sent the Iwakura Mission of 1871–73, a delegation of senior ministers, to study the United States and Europe, and hired about three thousand foreign experts. Where private capital was lacking, the state took the first risks, much as the economic historian Alexander Gerschenkron’s theory of late development predicts.
An educated, commercial society. Japan began its modern era in 1868 with assets from the Tokugawa period, the 265 years of military rule before it: large cities such as Edo, today’s Tokyo, and Osaka, national markets for rice, silk and cotton, merchant houses such as Mitsui that dated from the seventeenth century, and a population in which perhaps 40 per cent of boys received some schooling. Rural households already spun, wove and reeled silk, unwinding it from cocoons, for sale. These traditions supplied modern industry with workers, managers, capital and customers.
Silk paid for machines. Raw silk was Japan’s great export, helped in the 1860s by a disease that devastated European silkworms. Reeled, or unwound from cocoons, by young women in Nagano and Gunma and shipped through Yokohama to France and the United States, silk earned the foreign currency that paid for imported machines, ships and Indian raw cotton. Japan’s heavy industry of steel and ships was financed in part by its light industry of textiles, and its light industry by the labour of its daughters.
THE TURNING POINT
The Osaka Spinning Company, 1883. The Osaka Spinning Company is the hinge because it proved that private, profit-making, large-scale industry could work in Japan. Earlier government mills had been small and mostly unprofitable. Shibusawa Eiichi, a former official turned banker, raised capital from aristocrats and merchants, imported 10,500 spindles, the rods that twist fibre into thread, used steam power and ran two shifts, day and night, with electric light from 1886. The mill made steady profits, investors copied it across the Osaka region, and within fifteen years Japan had turned from an importer of cotton yarn into an exporter. Once private investors saw that industry paid, Japan’s industrialisation could run on profit as well as policy.
What it changed
Japan competes in Asian markets. Japan’s mills soon challenged their teachers: by the 1900s Japanese cotton yarn and cloth competed with British and Indian goods in China and Korea, and Japanese shipping lines carried Indian cotton to Osaka. Japan became the first Asian country to beat the industrial West at its own trade in Asian markets, and reformers from China to India studied its example. In a world economy that cast most of Asia as a supplier of raw materials, Japan alone had escaped that role, showing that the gap between the industrial West and the rest of the world could be closed.
Empire becomes part of the economy. Taiwan supplied sugar and rice, Korea rice and land, and the Japanese-run South Manchuria Railway coal and soya beans, all on terms that served Japan. Colonial rule brought railways and factories built for Japanese purposes, and harsh treatment for those who resisted. Many Koreans lost land in the colonial land survey of 1910–18 and later emigrated to Japan and Manchuria as cheap labour. Japan had escaped colonial rule by industrialising, and then imposed it on its neighbours to feed that industry.
Regulation arrives a generation late. The protests against pollution from the Ashio copper mine, the mill girls’ strikes and the government’s survey of factory conditions in 1903 led to Japan’s first Factory Act in 1911, enforced only from 1916, which limited the hours of women and children. As in Britain, regulation followed a generation behind industrial growth, because the costs of industry fell first on those with the least power to stop them.
DISCUSSION QUESTION — How far was Japan’s industrialisation the achievement of the Meiji state?
The state’s role was decisive at the start. It abolished the domains, the territories of the feudal lords, created the taxes that paid for modernisation, built the railways and telegraphs, founded factories such as the Tomioka silk mill and the Yawata steelworks, and hired foreign experts, all within a generation, as the economic historian Alexander Gerschenkron’s model of late development predicts. Yet many state enterprises lost money and were sold cheaply to private firms in the 1880s, and the industries that earned Japan’s foreign currency, cotton spinning and the reeling of silk thread from cocoons, grew mainly through private investment, from the banker Shibusawa’s Osaka Spinning Company to thousands of small rural silk workshops. Historians such as Thomas Smith stressed the state, while later work by Penelope Francks and others emphasises the inheritance of markets, merchants and literacy from the Tokugawa shoguns, the military rulers who governed until 1868, and the labour of young women. A balanced judgement credits the state with setting the direction and removing obstacles, and private enterprise and women’s labour with doing most of the work. Countries that industrialise late can use the state to accelerate industry, but they still need a society ready to respond.
An interesting fact
Recruiting workers for the Tomioka Silk Mill in 1872 proved surprisingly hard, because of a rumour that the French staff drank the blood of young women; they had been seen drinking red wine. To reassure families, the mill’s first director, Odaka Atsutada, enrolled his own daughter Yū, then about fourteen, as one of the first trainees, and other officials followed his example. The brick buildings, put up by Japanese carpenters and tilers working to a French design, still stand, and in 2014 UNESCO, the United Nations’ cultural agency, listed the mill as a World Heritage Site. Industry needed the trust of families as well as machines, and the officials who built it sometimes had to win that trust by sending their own daughters in first.
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