How far did the Meiji state industrialise Japan?

The short answer

• The shock of Western power. China tried to stop British opium sales, but Britain's steam-powered navy defeated it in the Opium War of 1839–42. Commodore Perry's American steam warships arrived off Japan in 1853 and showed that Japan, too, could not keep foreigners out. Treaties signed under threat limited its import tariffs and its courts' reach. Many samurai, members of the hereditary warrior class, concluded that Japan needed industry to finance an army and navy capable of avoiding China's fate. Fear of Western power gave modernization urgency.
• A state that chose industry. The Meiji government that took power in 1868 dismantled the domains of the daimyo, the feudal lords who had ruled Japan's regions. It raised a national army by conscription, or compulsory service, and collected a cash land tax. The revenue supported railways, telegraphs, shipyards and model factories that private firms could copy. Officials also looked abroad for knowledge. The Iwakura Mission of 1871–73 sent senior ministers to study the United States and Europe, and the government hired about three thousand foreign experts. Where private capital was missing, the state accepted the early risks, as economic historian Alexander Gerschenkron's theory of late development predicts.
• An educated, commercial society. Modern industry could draw on institutions and skills developed during the preceding 265 years of Tokugawa military rule. Edo, today's Tokyo, and Osaka were large cities; rice, silk and cotton circulated in national markets; merchant houses such as Mitsui dated from the seventeenth century. Perhaps 40 percent of boys had received some schooling. Rural households already spun, wove and reeled silk from cocoons for sale. These activities supplied workers, managers, capital and customers for new enterprises.
• Silk paid for machines. Imported machinery, ships and Indian raw cotton had to be paid for in foreign currency. Japan's great export, raw silk, earned it. Disease devastated European silkworms in the 1860s and helped Japanese trade. Young women in Nagano and Gunma reeled thread from cocoons, and the silk traveled through Yokohama to France and the United States. Their textile labor helped finance further light industry and heavy industries making steel and ships.

What it changed

Japan competes in Asian markets. By the 1900s Japanese cotton yarn and cloth were competing against British and Indian goods in China and Korea. Japanese shipping lines carried Indian cotton to Osaka, and reformers from China to India studied Japan's example. It was the first Asian country to beat the industrial West at its own trade in Asian markets. In a world economy that assigned much of Asia the role of raw-material supplier, Japan alone had escaped that role, showing that the industrial gap could be closed.

Empire becomes part of the economy. The empire supplied Japan on terms set for Japanese benefit. Taiwan provided sugar and rice, Korea rice and land, and the Japanese-run South Manchuria Railway coal and soya beans. Colonial authorities built railways and factories for Japanese purposes and treated resistance harshly. Many Korean farmers lost land through the colonial survey of 1910–18 and later emigrated to Japan and Manchuria as cheap labor. Japan had used industrial strength to escape colonial rule; it then imposed rule on its neighbors to feed that industry.

Regulation arrives a generation late. Industrial growth exposed people with little power to serious costs. Communities protested pollution from the Ashio copper mine, mill girls struck, and the government's 1903 survey documented factory conditions. Japan passed its first Factory Act in 1911, limiting the hours of women and children, though enforcement began only in 1916. As in Britain, regulation followed industrial growth by a generation.