How far did the Meiji state industrialise Japan?

The short answer

• 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.

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.