I was reading the cover story in Newsweek magazine and it is about the Chinese inferiority complex.
At one point it says something like that China was jealous because Japan was successful at industrializing early on, and China was not.
So my question is, why? Why was Japan so much more industrialized than China or any other Asian nation I can think of?
Warning: I know very little of Japanese history, so keep it reasonably simple please.
What you are talking about is part of the Meiji Restoration. Japan managed to pole vault over 400 years of development in less than 70. This took massive amounts of work. It helped tremendously that the Japanese are a pretty monolithic and uniform culture, so that when they get started down a path, there are few nay-sayers in the way. The Japanese also sent hundreds of scholars, engineers and the like overseas to study, learn, and bring back the knowledge Japan needed to industrialize. They copied anything useful. For example, the new Naval College Japan built was an exact replica of the Royal Naval College in Dartmouth, Great Britain, where they sent their first officers to be trained, including the great Japanese hero Admiral Togo.
This is a very short summary and others will certainly be able to go into detail, but Japan industrialized rather late; in the 17th century, the country adopted a policy of isolation now known as Sakoku which effectively cut off all political and economic relations to other nations. This lasted for more than two centuries; in the 19th century, when imperial expansionism gained momentum, the governments of the U.S. and several European states became interested in setting up trade relations to Japan. In 1853, an American fleet under the command of Commodore Matthew Perry entered the Tokyo bay and forced the Japanese government, with the blunt threat of their gunpower, to open Japanese ports to foreign ships. As a consequence of that, Japan signed a series of treaties granting trade privileges to foreign investors.
This, eventually, led to the fall of the shogunate system which had ruled Japan for centuries. In 1868, the shogun (an officeor military leaders who had ruled the country, the emperor being a mere figurehead) resigned and returned power to the emperor, who adopted the name Meiji. It was during the Meiji era with its extensive reforms that Japan changed from a backward isolated society to a modern industrialized nations within a few decades.
It also helped beyond measure that Japan was not early on conquered by the Portuguese, Spanish, Dutch, French or English. How many nations might have modernized if they hadn’t been subject to colonialism can only be supposed.
I’m lazy, lazy, lazy…
…so I’m going to copy and paste some comments from an old, related thread. More China-centered, but it addresses in part why Japan succeeded, where China failed.
As regards to China’s decline:
The decline was really very rapid - China in the mid-18th century was still a very vibrant, major power and an aggressively expansionist one at that ( not a lot of people realize that virtually all of what is now the western half of China on maps was only permanently conquered in the 17th and 18th centuries - Ming China was ~ half the size of China today ). However starting in the 17th century Qing China “suffered” a massive population boom - the result of a final synergy between a long internal peace and the culmination of centuries of agricultural refinement. Qing burecracy, already somewhat skeletal, failed to keep pace, with a concurrent increase in internal disorder. Opium almost by its lonesome reversed centuries of net trade surpluses, eventually causing a massive bleed of hard currency overseas and greatly depressing the silver-based Chinese economy. As internal disorder multiplied and the Chinese imperial government ossified after the 1790’s, a serious of major revolts, especially the most incredibly destructive civil war in history, the Taiping Rebellion, devastated and further destabilized China. Meanwhile the industrial revolution gradually allowed Europe to undersell domestic Chinese goods, a situation that accelerated as China plunged into chaos in the mid-19th century.
Despite this, China struggled hard to modernize in the mid-to-late 19th century in particular, much as Japan and the Ottomans did in the same period. Japan succeeded, China and the Ottoman state, partly through their own failures and partly due to outside events sweeping them up, did not.
Japan did suffer some of the same pressures for awhile. After 1866 imports exceeded exports and while the tremendous demand for exported tea and raw silk caused local shortages as increased demand surpassed increased production, imports of cheap cotton textiles devastated the local industry and caused, as in China with its opium problem, a net drain on hard currency ( especially gold in this case, which was overvalued by the Tokugawa Bakufu, where five silver coins could be changed for one gold coin vs. an international standard of 15-1, which meant that until measures were taken to devalue the currency, the river of silver flowing out of China could be used to suck Japan dry of gold ).
However Japan had a number of advantages. One was that there was quite frankly less pressure on Japan, partly because Japan was a lesser market compared to China and partly because Japan, which had been forcefully exposed as being in an inferior position in one dramatic moment, very pragmatically did not get themselves into spitting matches until they were capable of handling the Europeans on closer to even terms. China, meanwhile, less realistic and less in control of events, suffered from the aftermath of such affairs as the Opium Wars and the Boxer Rebellion.
Moreover Japan’s long isolated stagnation under a single stifling regime had in a sense ‘gentled’ down the country. Despite the brief, violent upheavals of the disenfranchised samurai/shizoku elites and the occasional peasant protests over the disruptions of reform, it was really much easier to establish strong central control in Japan than China. No real ethnic minorities ( powerless Ainu excepted ), religious minorities defanged compared to the bad old days, smallish country with no unstable borders or real places for rebels to hide for very long, peasant militancy largely and long since beaten into the dust by centuries of tight central absolutism and a concentration of military resources in a socially seperate military caste. Japan suffered nothing compared to the internal upheavals China did and did not start from a point of re-building from utter social chaos as both China and the Ottomans were forced too.
Finally the Meiji Restoration, outward trappings of imperial rule aside, was ultimately a really quite radical revolution, perhaps every bit as radical as the American Revolution. Unlike the moribund Qing and Ottoman edifices that had to negotiate reforms within the context of decrepit governments with strong reactionary elements, Japan was in a way free to re-invent itself and did so in truly dynamic fashion. Possibly because tJapan was so isolated, yet orderly, much more so and later than China, the shock and impetus to rebuild when their werak position was exposed was also greater.
Well part of it you can deduce from my above comments on Japan. Both China and Japan suffered from popular resistance to change by those frightened by the implications of modernization ( just as the Luddites and similar groups had protested the Industrial Revolution in the west decades earlier ), but Japan was much better positioned to overcome that kind of societal inertia. Further the imperial edifice really was not as nimble and efficient at tackling reform ( indeed was structurally incapable of being so ) as the Meiji government. Also the timing was piss-poor - the internal crisis of 1850-1875 really shattered the country in many ways ( among other things the government had to borrow heavily from the west ). China was perennially dead broke - Japan was always able to keep a steady revenue stream by taxing the peasantry, something China could only sporadically accomplish ( and even then there was a far more massive agrarian regression in China and a need to rebuild from major destruction ). Further the internal and external wars resulted in China concentrating disproportionally on economically unproductive military industries, slighting economic and administrative reforms, whereas Japan had the luxury of following a much more balanced approach. Consequently by the late 1890’s Japan was not only self-sufficient in modern, mass-produced cotton textiles - it was horning in on European exports of the same to places like China, doing their own part to undermine the Chinese economy.
From this old thread: WHY Did Chinese Civilization Decline? - Great Debates - Straight Dope Message Board
Someone said that the Japanese wisely avoided tangling with the West until they were ready. It seems to me that they swallowed humiliation but it was culturally anathema for them to do so. The shame was so powerful that the shogunates fell and the country industrialized itself without foreign aid in a mere 70 years. Soon enough Japan declared war on Russia and started a conquest of neighboring countries. Pearl harbor would seem to be payback for the humiliating trade treaties. And it seems significant that the US had to resort to nuclear terror to force Japan to surrender.
Are there views too heretical for the audience? Maybe they sound completely off the wall, even biased. I would like to hear your feedback. (PS I am Indian)
China was a much more fractured society than Japan.
I think Japan industrialized in less time than the zombification of this thread. 
At any rate, it’s probably much easier for a smaller country to shift gears than a much larger one.
Well its my understanding after the A bomb was dropped on them united states gave them microchip technology which at the time we couldn’t do any thing with and 4 billion dollars a year since then. Plus tax exemptions on a lot of there car imports. two of these facts Ross Pero brought out into the open when he ran against Clinton election. The rest they got from reverse engineering other people stuff to find out why it wore out and wear so they could cut back on the amount of actual materials used in newer versions. Also united states while clinton was in office gave sharps and other foreign based company’s property’s around international airports with embassy status to avoid import export taxs. Think that was also part of the trade agreement we had with mexico shipping products threw our borders to canada without paying import or export taxs. Which Ross Pero spear headed. And no don’t got links to any of my sources just my memory.
Your understanding is wrong.
The US didn’t “give” them microelectronics technology - Japan lagged behind the US in microelectronics development, although they were very good at copying US designs and making those copies very inexpensively.
PS - it’s Perot.
Guess we didn’t give them 4 billion a year or tax exempt on most there products either lol
The Qing dynasty was Manchu (with significant Mongol alliances) and the tensions of a tiny minority ruling over a huge China contributed significantly to China’s weakness in the 19th century vis-a-vis the Western powers. For example, military technology development stagnated because the Manchu and Mongols did not want Han Chinese too involved in such pursuits. China went from having among the best cannons in the world at the end of the Ming dynasty to being hopelessly antiquated by the 19th century.
After the Opium wars, European countries all but ran China from the International Settlements in Shanghai. They deliberately built up their own modern economy of factories, foreign trade, and banking to dominate the rest of China, whose industrialization was something they definitely did not want. They didn’t see it as a mass market for goods with a population predominantly of rural farmers, and they could import much of what the smaller affluent population needed. They did allow the opium to seep back in and made partners of the drug lords.
Most other Asian countries have similar stories, except that France and Britain had even more direct control over their governments and economies. It’s an incredibly sordid history.
That’s why imperialism, colonialism, and capitalism became such dirty words in 20th century China and the rest of East Asia. The Communists took a long time to build to power, but they had a century of legitimate grievances as a foundation. Not to mention that the “official” government was corrupt, brutal, and inefficient. I can’t condone the many horrors perpetrated by the Communists, but they had learned from others - including the Japanese, whose treatment of the areas they conquered in China in the 1930s and 1940s was purely sickening. No heroes here, just reprisals and revenge plus thoughts of being top dog in a future without such humiliations.
Here I just though china got a bad business reputation
Thank you for china actual history.
I think even if the atomic bombs hadn’t been dropped japan would have lost. Due to mentality. One when they hit pearl harbor they should have continue all the way up the east coast. Two the Japanese thinking is its a honor to die in battle for a veteran. Instead of sending their seasons soldiers back home to train new recruits. They resorted to suicide runs. So if the united states would have not bombed them we would have eventually won. But it would have been at a very high cost. As for the two A bombs that were dropped. 1st one I think due to underground testing they didn’t factor in organic matters energy into the math of its damage. So they really didn’t grasp how much damage it would do. The second one I don’t think should have been dropped a week later. As for us dropping the atomic bombs I personally don’t agree with. But hide sights 20/20. But we didn’t start the battle japan did. I seem to remember a trip George bush senior took to japan and they were calling us lazy Americans. Then I found out later we were sending them 4 billion dollars a year from Ross Perot since we had bombed them in a war they started. So to be honest Japan can’t be the victims on both sides of things. War is War period.
Heretical isn’t the word that comes to mind; nonsensical is. Japan was most certainly not ready to tangle with the US, much less the entire West when it did in 1941. Japan was hopelessly outmatched by the United States, which possessed conservatively 10 times the war making potential of Japan in 1937 when Japan went to war with China. Obligatory link to the economics page at combinedfleet.com. That Japan was going to war with China in 1937 points to another big hole in said theory; Japan’s targets for expansion were its own Asian neighbors - Korea, Formosa, Manchuria, China. The war with Russia in 1904-05 was over Manchuria; Japan was just playing the colonial game which it felt it had as much right to do as the West. Further, Japan did not industrialize “without foreign aid”; it sought out foreign aid wherever possible. Before it became able to build its own modern warship domestically as a result of British aid, its ships were designed and built in Great Britain, its naval officers were trained by the British and it adopted British naval traditions.
Pearl Harbor was most certainly not “payback for the humiliating trade treaties”; Japan did not attack the United States on a whim or out of some latent desire for revenge over decades old perceived wrongs. Japan was still bogged down trying to conquer China in 1941, and the war in China had been steadily souring US-Japanese relations to the point that the US government began taking extreme measure, first freezing Japanese assets in the US and then embargoing the sale of various goods to Japan, starting with scrap metal (of which the US was a major source of for Japan) and finally with the embargo of the sale of oil to Japan which started the clock on the inevitability of war between the US and Japan. In 1941 the US was the world’s largest producer and exporter of oil, producing over half of the world’s oil, and had convinced the British and the Dutch to join in the oil embargo. Japan’s domestic production of oil was negligible, so Japan was going to have to choose between three alternatives before its oil reserves ran out: do nothing and have its economy collapse in short order, cave to US demands to end the war in and leave China, or take a source of oil by force in the form of the Dutch East Indies and go to war with the US.
I think I need a cite for that four billion figure you keep quoting.
Plus attacking all our battle ships in pearl harbor just ticked us off. We may not get along all the time but we can fight.
I know this is an old reply, but I want to point out that the technological gap at the end of the sakoku period is often overstated. It certainly wasn’t 400 years – the period of isolation only lasted from 1639 to 1854, or 215 years. During those years, technological innovation and science didn’t just stop. On the contrary, the stability brought by the strong government created an environment that made possible the formation of a relatively large class of scholars. Of course, being cut off from most of the world meant that Japan missed out on the industrial revolution, which made their lag all the more dramatic in the mid-19th century. However, the isolation was never complete. There were scholars specializing in western science and medicine, for instance.
I think it’s important to note that Japan was able to industrialize quickly because they sent many scholars to study abroad, and they were able to do so because they had a relatively large number of suitable scholars to send abroad in the first place.
To understand the sort of technological culture that thrived during the isolation period, it might be a good idea to read up on things like Japanese clocks and karakuri dolls, and people like mathematician Takakazu Seki who independently discovered calculus, and of course the whole field of “Dutch studies,” or rangaku.