As far as I can tell, Japan was the only non-European based maritime country that achieved a self sufficient modern technological economy that could rival the most powerful country in the world by the eary 1940’s.
I find this very interesting and I admit I haven’t done any serious research in this area, but on the surface I think the reasons may be:
1.Japan is a maritime country. This fosters trade and absorption of technology.
Japan was a unified country for a long time, with little or no ethnic tensions ignoring the small Ainu community.
Japan had/has little in the way of natural resources. This probably resulted in a lack of European incentive to exploit, on the other hand this provided an incentive to exploit the region.
So far my reasons seem woefully inadequate to explain the rise of Japan in the 20th century.
They made a point of surveying other countries and adopting/adapting those technologies and practices with a proven track record: the British railroad system, the German educational system (to this day, elementary-school kids look like they’re members of the kriegsmarine), and the postal system of France (or the US, I forget which).
Also, it helped that the impetus for this wholescale about-face came from a single individual with God-like authority (Emperor Meiji) instead of a cadre of faceless bureaucrats and/or politicians. China is a good example of how this can work in reverse, and why Japan ascended technologically and militarily, while its neighbor languished.
Japan also had the carrot and stick support of the U.S. When the U.S. forced Japan to open its borders to trade, it also protected Japan from the general pillaging that Britain allowed after forcing China to open its borders. Once Meiji saw what was happening in China, he ordered his country to industrialize. China was large enough that once the British disrupted the central control (while allowing other European powers to stake their own claims in different locales), China was prevented from carrying out any similar program of modernization.
3 is close. All the Europeans were coming from the West, so they were the farthest place to conquer and fiddle with. So when a foreign power finally came, a bunch of guys looked at China and how much the situation there sucked due to Briish imperialism and decided that Japan’s only chance was to become an imperialist country as well. Then those guys overthrew the government, reinstalled the emperor as the center of government, and using his power (as he was still a boy) were able to force the country to modernize at break-neck speed.
Whether England would actually have eventually gotten around to overtaking and messing about with Japan, I’m not certain. Several of their exploits were, I believe, more of a hastle maintaining than they were really worth. And in fact Britain was the country which provided the most help to Japan in modernizing, so it may be that they had decided by this point that trade with a solid government and a modern nation would be more profitable than colonization.
As to the nation which first came to Japan to open them up to the outside world (the US), they immediately got started with the Civil War and forgot all about Japan. But what their intentions were for the future of Japan is unknown.
Yes, I read the subsequent explanation. However was that all it took to take a third world country into a major mil;itary and economic power in such quick time? Is there a lesson here for other leaders of third world countries?
Japanese culture though made the transition easier to do than it would be in other nations. Wheras Chinese culture was fiercely traditional and mostly anti-western, Japanese culture saw what the west had to offer and what was going on in China and that it was in their best interests to Westernize.
It also helped that the Japanese tended to be more loyal to their Emperor than the Chinese, and the western occupation only made it worse for China, especially with various factions of the Chinese government in-fighting about whether to Westernize or not. I think the Empress Dowager also played a big role in why China could never westernize, but I don’t remember it exactly.
It’s been a while since I studied up on this, so take it all with a grain of salt.
Mmmm…not so much. There were revolts against the westernization throughout the Meiji modernization period.
Essentially, the Japanese government saw what happened to China when they refused to modernize and believed that if they didn’t modernize extremely quickly, they would likely be next.
No. They had to basically completely transform Japanese society top to bottom along with invest massive amounts of capital in order to build telecommunications, railroads and factories, along with new educational facilities and the hiring of thousands of foreign experts to advise them. Another advantage was that Japan was already a fairly educated society by the standards of the time - at least by the standards of the day (maybe not in physics, per se, but the culture of education was there). There were also not a lot of “wilderness” areas where government was difficult.
I don’t think there’s really a lesson for many third world countries except that if you get enough capital to build infrastructure, it helps. Japan had the capital, whereas most third world countries these days don’t.
Don’t forget, the relative size of the country helped. The US is 16th in the world in broadband connectivity, but the countries that are more connected are a lot smaller. While size helps you muscle things around, it also makes it hard to initiate changes. Creating an educational system in Japan is one thing. In China… it’s a much bigger task.
Despite what we’d like to believe, dictatorships can be great in terms of raw industrialization. Russia went from essentially a third world country the second biggest world power in the course of thirty years. Communist China is doing much better financially than democratic India. The Chinese have nearly twice the per-capita buying power, half the number of people living below the poverty line, and a much more reasonably literacy rate than India.
Citation on that? Is broadband availabilty that scarce in the US? I’m in the US, and am on DSL because the local telco seduced me by actually paying me cash to sign up. With a very hard sell from the telco rep. Admittedly I live in an affluent, urbanized area. But the price was dirt cheap. $20 a month at the moment. Do that many folks in the US live where broadband isn’t possible?
Personally, I’m curious as to whether the availability number is based on geographic availability or availability to whichever portion of the population. In the US, there’s lots of empty space, used mostly for agriculture, uninhabited deserts/mountains, etc. where you’d be lucky to get a cell phone signal, much less high-speed internet access. It’s much cheaper to get high-speed access for half of say, Norway, than it is for half of the United States. That said, the quoted figure very well could still refer to how much of the population has access. If it’s cheaper to cover a larger portion of a smaller country, then it’s also cheaper to cover a larger portion of a smaller country’s population (since they’d tend to be closer together than, say, a New Yorker and a Los Angelino)
Yes. I live in a very very rural area where DSL only became available this year. And cable still isn’t offered where I live. Add to that, I can’t even get cell phone reception in my town. I bet there are more people now in the US who live where broadband is available than don’t, but there is still a significant portion of Americans who do live in the middle of nowhere. Nations like Japan and those in Europe have a much more dense population than the US.
It helped immensely that Japan was never reduced to a colony/protectorate during the age of high European imperialism.
Japan was visted early by Portuguese and Dutch ships during the sixteenth century. But alarmed by European influence, the Tokugawa Shoganate in the seventeenth century expelled all foreigners, massacred all Christian converts in the country, and closed Japan except for an offshore island trading port.
This status quo continued for two hundred years until the famous Admiral Perry expedition forcibly opened Japan to foreign ships in 1853. The Japanese became acutely aware that they were under gunboat diplomacy as they had to sign treaties favorable to the West in 1854 and 1858. This stimulated the Boshin War of 1868, where the shoganate was overthrown and the Meiji dynasty placed in power, with the express aim of modernizing fast enough to avoid domination by the West. It helped that the shoganate and feudalism had been ripe for overturning already.
A modernizing Japan was also uniquely placed to help the British counter increasing Russian influence in China. By occupying Korea and parts of Manchuria, the Japanese served British interests against the Russians. Then Japan was prescient enough to side against Germany in World War One, allowing it to take German possessions in the Pacific and have a victor’s place at the bargaining table.
Short answer: Japan hung on to the old ways at the right time, and radically changed at the right time.
Another argument I’ve heard is that a culture that depends on rice cultivation for sustenance requires a high degree of cooperation and social cohesion, together with large scale organization and planning. So rice growing cultures like the Japanese were well suited for the transition to industrialization.
I don’t know enough about the issues involved to really gauge the value of this theory. Maybe it was the rice growing cultural background combined with the unique historical circumstances in Japan that other posters have mentioned.
There is a common misconception in the West that Japanese emperors were considered to have God-like (political) authority. Although they were said to be divine, it was not what a Western god would be. They have not traditionally had political power, and were used by the various actual holders of power, such as the shoganate (bakufu) government.
It was the bakufu which opened Japan to the West, in the face of Perry’s long range cannons, and some of the dissatisfied daimyo, lead by Satsuma and Chosu, used that as the excuse to dump the bakufu. While they used the slogan of restoring the emperor, the genro took over the task of governing once they accomplished their task.
Back to pre-restoration. In the 1863, Satsuma picked the wrong country to attempt to show they could play with the big boys. England destroyed their forts and bombarded the city, causing great destruction. The forts were on small islands in the bay, and the British ships with their longer range cannon leisurely floated by pounding the forts into mud. (An aside, I used to live in Kagoshima, and played tennis on restored land near the area. The islands are now just hills on restored land.) Chosu tried the same mistake and this time the Britain, France, the Netherlands and the USA all joined in bombarding and then landing on Shinonoseki. As these two most powerful provinces couldn’t match the Western powers, many people realized that the game was up, they needed to modernize. They researched that a lot of the industrialization of the West had happened in about 50 years (IIRC, no cite for this fact) and set out to quickly modernize.
This era of Japanese history is interesting. Books could be – and are – written about it, but I like Lumpy’s answer.
Most reasonable people wouldn’t justify wholesale slaughter, political persecution, religious suppression, and abuse of minorities just to advance economic progress. These countries did just that, though, and Communist China still practices this to some degree.
India has its problems, sure, but I think it is showing in recent years that it is possible to have political freedom and economic progress both. It should be noted that it took India to abandon socialism to a great degree before this progress could be attained.