# Japan: Past and Present/Chapter 9

Chapter IX
The Creation of a Modern State
By the middle of the nineteenth century, political and social changes were long overdue in Japan. Since the political system had been basically reactionary even in the early seventeenth century, it was by now more than two hundred years out of date. The growth of nationalism and the development of a full-fledged commercial economy had made Japan ready for an entirely new political and social order. But so well had the early Tokugawa succeeded in creating a system capable of preserving political stability that the machine was still running relatively smoothly. It took an outside force to disrupt it. This force was provided by the Europeans, who came not only from Europe but also from their newer homes in America.
In the last years of the eighteenth century the Russians, who had crossed the vast land expanse of Siberia and reached the Pacific, began to attempt to establish contacts with the Japanese. At about the same time the English, who had supplanted the Portuguese and Spanish as the chief mariners and traders in Far Eastern ​waters, began to try to rewin entry into Japan. But the Americans were most interested of all in opening Japanese ports. Their whaling vessels frequented the North Pacific and the waters around Japan, and American clipper ships, bound for China on the great circle route across the Pacific, passed close to the shores of Japan. The Americans wanted permission for their whalers and clipper ships to enter Japanese ports to take on water and replenish their stores, and when steamships came into use, the desirability of a coaling station in Japan became obvious.
Not infrequently, also, American and European sailors were wrecked on the shores of Japan. The laws of the land decreed death for any foreigner entering the country, and although this was not always enforced, those unlucky mariners stranded in Japan who eventually got out by way of Nagasaki usually had tales to tell of extremely cruel treatment.
In the first half of the nineteenth century the Americans, English, and Russians repeatedly sent expeditions to Japan in efforts to persuade the Japanese to open their ports to foreign ships, and the Dutch urged them to accede to these demands. But Edo stood firm on its old policy. A few scholars among the native students of Western science bravely advocated the opening of Japan, but the vast majority of the people, long accustomed to isolation from the rest of the world, were bitterly opposed to permitting foreigners to enter their land. It was obvious that Japan would not voluntarily open its doors.
The American government eventually decided to delay matters no longer, but to force the doors of Japan ​open. For this purpose, it dispatched a considerable naval force under Commodore Matthew C. Perry. Perry steamed into Tokyo Bay in July 1853. After delivering a letter from the President of the United States to the ruler of Japan, demanding the inauguration of trade relations, he withdrew to the Ryukyu Islands for the winter, with the promise that he would return early the next year to receive a reply.
Edo was thrown into a state of complete confusion over this sudden crisis. The Japanese were appalled by the size and guns of the American “black ships,” as they called them, and they were amazed by the steam-powered vessels which moved up the bay against the wind. They realized that their own shore batteries were almost useless against the American warships, before which Edo, too, lay defenseless.
The government split into two factions—conservatives who blindly advocated the expulsion of the foreigners, and realists who saw that Japan could do nothing but bow to American demands. In their own indecision, the Edo authorities did a most unusual thing. For the first time in over 600 years of military rule, the Shogun’s government asked the opinion of the emperor on an important problem of state and invited counsel also from the Daimyo. Conservative Kyoto and the Daimyo of the land were of course strongly in favor of expelling the foreigners.
The Edo government was indeed caught on the horns of a dilemma when Perry’s fleet returned to Tokyo Bay in February 1854. The emperor and the nation as a whole demanded a policy which Edo was quite incapable of carrying out. Under the threatening ​guns of the American ships, the Tokugawa had no choice but to sign a treaty with the United States, opening two ports to American ships and permitting a certain amount of closely regulated trade.
Once the door had been pushed open a crack, there was no closing it. Within two years Edo had signed treaties with England, Russia, and Holland, and in 1856 Townsend Harris, the first American consul general, arrived in Japan to negotiate a full commercial treaty. This he concluded two years later, and the European powers soon made similar treaties with Japan. The door was now wide open. Foreigners were permitted permanent residence at five ports and also at the great cities of Osaka and Edo, and free and unrestricted trade relations were sanctioned. Foreign merchants began to set up their business concerns at the fishing village of Yokohama, which grew rapidly and within a few decades developed into one of the great ports of the world.
The Tokugawa realized that because of their own military impotence they could do nothing to check the foreigners. Rather belatedly they initiated reforms designed to modernize their military establishment, starting with the building of a small occidental-type navy. However, the Kyoto court and the vast majority of the feudal domains, which still had seen nothing of the overpowering military might of the Westerners, showed little interest in military modernization and remained completely unreconciled to Edo’s action in opening up the land to foreigners. The cry of “expel the barbarians” grew in all quarters of the land.
The Tokugawa branch family at Mito led the ​opposition within the Edo government, and men from Mito in 1860 assassinated the Prime Minister who had concluded the new commercial treaties. Other irreconcilable conservatives from Satsuma murdered an Englishman near Yokohama, and the forts of the great western Honshu fief of Choshu fired on American, French and Dutch vessels passing through the narrow Straits of Shimonoseki at the western end of the Inland Sea. The Kyoto court, rising to a new sense of authority, began to demand that Edo expel the foreigners. The emperor even took the unprecedented step of summoning the Shogun to Kyoto, and the Shogun, showing how far Edo had already gone in surrendering authority to the emperor, meekly complied.
All the dissident elements in Japan and particularly the samurai of the great “outer Daimyo” domains of western Japan, which had been forced to recognize Tokugawa supremacy for two and a half centuries, without ever becoming reconciled to it, now saw the widening cracks in the hitherto impregnable armor of the Tokugawa. Edo had been compelled by the Western powers to adopt the unpopular policy of opening the land to foreign intercourse, a policy that ran counter to the expressed wishes of the emperor. The Tokugawa were at last vulnerable to attack. Their opponents, summing up their stand in the double slogan, “honor the emperor—expel the barbarians,” pressed the attack by intrigues at Kyoto and by military preparations, which led to pitched battles between Edo and the western Honshu fief of Choshu. The great Edo regime, still the paramount military power of the land, was foundering, not because the machinery of ​government had broken down, but because it had lost the confidence of the nation. Even the supporters of Edo had been persuaded by historians and Shinto propagandists to admit the right of the emperor to rule.
The end of the Edo regime came in a surprising way. A son of the Tokugawa Lord of Mito became the new Shogun in 1867, and, as befitted a scion of the family that had championed Japanese historical studies for the past two centuries, he voluntarily surrendered the actual rule of the country to the emperor in the autumn of that year. The year 1868 saw some desultory fighting at Edo and in northern Japan between the supporters of imperial rule and die-hard adherents of the Tokugawa regime, but the end of Tokugawa rule cost surprisingly little bloodshed. Despite its continued efficiency, the Edo system had become so hopelessly unsuited to the mentality of the Japanese nation that, once it started to crack, it collapsed suddenly and completely.
The new imperial government naturally centered around the person of the emperor, for it had been the revived theory of imperial rule which had made the overthrow of the Tokugawa possible. The coup d’état came to be referred to as the “Restoration” of imperial rule, but this did not mean that the emperor himself was to be in control. A boy of fifteen had recently ascended the throne, and although this young emperor grew to be a strong figure in the central government of Japan, eventually being recognized as one of the great men of Japanese history, in the early years of his reign he was too young and inexperienced to be a dominant force.
​The court aristocracy around the emperor included a few capable men and in time produced some important statesmen, such as Prince Saionji and, later, Prince Konoye, two descendants of branches of the ancient Fujiwara family who were to become Premiers of the new Japan. But for the most part the Kyoto courtiers lacked the experience and the drive to become forceful in the new government. Some of the “outer Daimyo” participated in its work, but few of them were truly important political figures. High posts of government were largely held by imperial princes, court nobles, and Daimyo, but the leadership of the new regime actually was taken by a group of young and often relatively poor samurai who had come to dominate the politics of Satsuma, Choshu, and other “outer Daimyo” fiefs in western Japan, and for a decade had been intriguing against the Tokugawa at Kyoto and in the capitals of their own domains.
By tradition these young samurai of western Japan were all hostile to the Tokugawa, and they rallied to the imperial cause as the best way to attack Edo. At first they were also bitterly anti-foreign, and until the Tokugawa collapse they echoed the popular cry, “honor the emperor—expel the barbarians.” But long before they came to power in the final months of 1867 they had come to realize that it was impossible to “expel the barbarians.”
Major railway lines of Modern Japan
Satsuma soon launched its own small navy along modern lines, and the young officers who began their naval careers in Satsuma were to become the men who created and dominated the Imperial Japanese Navy until well into the twentieth century. Similarly, Choshu, abandoning the concept of a small warrior class, started to create from its peasantry a modern army trained in the techniques of European military science. The success of this attempt was clearly demonstrated in 1866, when Edo dispatched forces to chastise Choshu for its anti-Tokugawa intrigues. The aristocratic warriors of Edo were fought to a standstill by the peasant recruits of Choshu, led by a group of young samurai officers who were to become the dominant element in the officer corps of the Imperial Japanese Army. The samurai of Satsuma and Choshu, far from remaining champions of anti-foreign conservatism, had ushered in the military and social revolution that would sweep away the last vestiges of the feudal order in Japan.
Finding themselves in virtual control of the new imperial government in the late autumn of 1867, the young samurai of western Japan embarked on a daring course of rapid modernization, which amounted to a ​revolution in Japanese society and government. This revolution did not, like those in nineteenth-century Europe, boil up from below. It was carefully planned at the top and forced upon the people by a relatively small but extremely vigorous group in control of the government. The leaders had the advantage of coming for the most part from the same samurai background, and they had arrived at a similar point of view through similar experiences and influences. Since they were young, they were mentally and emotionally more eager for sweeping changes than their elders. And they were extremely talented, having achieved their leadership by demonstrating superior abilities and a capacity for adjustment to new situations in the confused politics of their individual Daimyo realms, and in the intrigues and counter-intrigues of the Kyoto court.
The leaders of the new regime also had another advantage—they inherited the strong and reasonably efficient Tokugawa government almost intact. The central administration had not been eaten away by decay and corruption, as had often been the case in other countries when revolutionary governments came into power. Japan entered its great revolutionary period a unified, centralized nation, unravaged by any prolonged period of political disruption and disunity.
The contrast with China and Korea, Japan’s only neighbors, was marked. Both these countries, during the nineteenth century, suffered prolonged periods of political decline. The Manchu dynasty of China, after two hundred years of strong rule, was slowly dying from inner decay, and China was to fall into a sad state of political disruption before Republican ​revolutionaries seized the disintegrating reins of government in 1911. The contrast between the political unity and efficient administration the Japanese revolutionaries inherited from the Tokugawa, and the political disunity and disrupted central government the Chinese revolutionaries inherited from the Manchu dynasty, does much to explain the more rapid progress the Japanese made in modernizing their country, and the entirely unprecedented economic and military supremacy Japan was soon to win in the Far East.
The leaders of the new imperial regime had all been deeply impressed by the helplessness of Edo, Satsuma, and Choshu in the face of occidental military power, and the humiliation they had been forced to suffer because of their military backwardness. Quite naturally, they were obsessed with the idea of creating a Japan capable of holding its own in the modern world. Since they were military men by tradition and early training, they thought primarily in terms of military power; but they were surprisingly broad-minded in their approach to the problem, realizing that to achieve military strength Japan needed economic, social, and intellectual renovation. They set out to make Japan strong, and they showed a willingness to do anything necessary to achieve this goal.
Early in January of 1868, the new government had the young emperor officially assume direct rule over the nation. The new era was given the name of Meiji, and the transfer of power from the Tokugawa to the group around the emperor came to be known as the Meiji Restoration. Meiji remained the official title for ​the rest of the emperor’s long reign, which lasted until 1912, and the name was then given to the emperor as his personal posthumous title. Two and a half centuries of rule from Edo had made the city so definitely the administrative center of Japan that the young reformers moved the imperial capital from Kyoto to Edo in the autumn of 1868 and renamed the city Tokyo, meaning “eastern capital.”
In the early spring of 1869, only a little over a year after they had come to power, the bright young samurai started the task of doing away completely with the feudal system under which they had grown up and which had given their class a dominant place in society. They persuaded the Daimyo of Satsuma, Choshu, and other leading fiefs in western Japan to offer their domains to the emperor, and the other Daimyo of Japan felt morally obliged to follow suit. Thus, at one bold stroke the division of Japan into feudal principalities came to a sudden end, in theory at least. Actually, however, during a brief period of transition, the Daimyo were appointed governors of their old fiefs, with one-tenth of their former revenues as personal salaries. Two years later, in 1871, the fiefs were entirely abolished, and the land was divided into a number of new political divisions called ken, or “prefectures.” This marked the definite end of the Daimyo as feudal lords. The government eventually made an economic settlement with them, giving them fairly generous lump sum payments in the form of government bonds, which helped insure their support of the new regime. The old Daimyo, who had produced few ​strong political figures in the new government, gradually left the political scene and became merely an element in the growing capitalist class of Japan.
In settling with the Daimyo, the government also gave them titles of nobility in the new peerage it was creating. The old Daimyo were divided into five noble ranks in accordance with the size of their old fiefs, with the last Tokugawa Shogun becoming a Prince and the lesser Daimyo receiving the lowest rank of Baron. Another large element in the nobility was composed of the former courtier families from Kyoto, who had little political influence and were relatively poor. The dominant role in the new aristocracy was in time actually taken by the bright young samurai from the western fiefs, who rewarded one another for their services to the nation with titles of nobility.
Freeing Japan from the control of a small and relatively weak group of Daimyo was a far easier task than stripping the many and vigorous samurai of the social, economic, and political privileges which had made them the dominant class of feudal Japan. Choshu had already pointed the way toward depriving the samurai of their status as an aristocratic caste of warriors, and the new government felt itself strong enough in the winter of 1872–73 to introduce universal military service. Under the able leadership of young officers, such as Yamagata of Choshu, an army of peasants was recruited, first on the French and then on the German model because of the military superiority Germany demonstrated in the Franco-Prussian War.
The loss of his cherished position as a warrior-aristocrat was hard enough on the samurai, but a more ​serious blow was the loss of his privileged economic status. At first the government had assumed the responsibility of paying pensions to the samurai in place of the hereditary stipends they had received from their feudal lords. However, the government reduced these pensions to only half the original stipends, which had never been generous. Then suddenly in 1876, the authorities demanded that these pensions be commuted into relatively small lump sum payments. This order, together with one of the same year prohibiting the samurai from wearing their traditional two swords, meant the end of the samurai as a class with feudal privileges. They had been reduced to the level of ordinary subjects of the emperor and had been cast forth to fend for themselves as individual citizens of the state.
Many of the abler samurai were already rising fast in the new government. Some were making careers for themselves in the professions. Others used their lump sum payments to start successful business enterprises. A large proportion of the samurai were attracted to the officer corps of the new army and navy, or became policemen, entitled to wear swords, a fact which may account for the prestige and authority of the ordinary Japanese policeman today.
Many of the samurai, however, found themselves unable to learn new methods of livelihood, or incapable of adjusting themselves mentally to the new world in which they lived. Irreconcilable conservatives among them from time to time defied the authority of the new government. The most serious of these samurai revolts occurred in Satsuma itself, where discontented conservatives rallied around Saigo Takamori, one of the young ​samurai of western Japan who had helped establish the new government, but had returned to Satsuma in protest against the policies of his colleagues. Saigo and his followers found themselves in open rebellion against Tokyo in 1877. The peasant army was dispatched against them, and the Satsuma conservatives soon learned that samurai armed with swords were no match for peasant soldiers, well-armed and well-drilled. The Satsuma rebellion of 1877 was the last gasp of a fast dying feudal society. In less than ten years the young reformers had rid themselves of this antiquated social and political system and had cleared the ground for more modern and more efficient political institutions.
The leaders of the new Japan realized full well that they could not stop merely at removing the old system. Theoretically, they had engineered a “Restoration” of the imperial rule of the seventh and eighth centuries, and they actually did revive many of the ancient names of offices and of governmental organs, but they knew that this was only theory and nomenclature. What they really desired to do was to establish a strong nation like the leading Western powers, and so naturally they looked to the West for new patterns of society and government.
The Tokugawa in their last years had been sending envoys and students abroad to learn the techniques and sciences of foreign lands, and the new government greatly expanded this program for studying the occidental world. The forty-five years of the Meiji period were essentially a time when the Japanese studied, borrowed, and gradually assimilated those elements of Western civilization which they chose to adopt. This ​period of learning from abroad was comparable only to the great period when the Japanese imported Chinese civilization over a thousand years earlier, but this time the process of learning from abroad was carried out on a larger scale and much more systematically. Students were chosen with care on the basis of their knowledge and capabilities, and the countries where they were to study were selected with equal care. The Japanese determined to learn from each Western country that in which it particularly excelled. They went to England to study the navy and merchant marine, to Germany for the army and for medicine, to France for law, and to the United States for business methods. The world was one vast school room for them, and they entered it determined to learn only the best in each field.
With its predominant interest in military strength, the new government naturally paid great attention to the creation of a strong army and navy along Western lines, but the young reformers knew that to be truly strong the new army and navy needed behind them an efficient and stable political system, a physically strong and technically competent people, and a sound and industrially advanced economic system. While building up the army and navy, therefore, they by no means neglected the other requisites for national strength.
The new government was in essence an oligarchy in the hands of fewer than one hundred young men. They had no reason to be dissatisfied with their own form of rule, but they saw the advantages of many Western political concepts and institutions as essential adjuncts ​of government in any strong state. These features of the West they borrowed in rapid succession. They created ministries on Western models in one administrative field after another; and they organized a prefectural system of rule which kept the control of each prefecture in the hands of the Tokyo government. They adopted the Western calendar, but held to the old Chinese system of counting years by “year periods,” which beginning with the Meiji “year period” became identical in duration with the reigns of the emperors. They adopted a policy of religious toleration, permitting the propagation of Christianity once more; they modernized the police, the currency, and organized a modern postal system; they revised and standardized the tax system, and created a national banking system, first on American and then on European lines; they established a civil service; and they revised the legal system and courts on French patterns. Finally, they established a Cabinet on the German model, and even drew up a Constitution for Japan, providing for a parliament called the Diet.
The last step showed that the oligarchy was at last broadening the basis of its rule. But unlike the constitutions and parliaments of Western lands, which had usually been the result of popular demand and pressure, the Japanese Constitution and Diet were the gift of the ruling oligarchy to the people. Of course, there was a growing demand on the part of a small segment of the public for a share in the government. This politically conscious group consisted largely of the samurai who had not won their way into the oligarchy and had taken lesser posts in the new government or ​become business men. It also included other members of the business community who, as legal equals of the old samurai class, felt that they were entitled to a voice in the government. However, the oligarchy was not forced to make concessions to the public. It did so primarily because influential members of the ruling group had reached the conclusion from their study of Western political institutions that a constitution was essential to a strong westernized state, and that some form of parliamentary government was also a necessary part of the political machinery which helped make Western powers strong.
In 1868, the emperor had made a so-called “charter oath” in which he had given rather vague promises of forming a deliberative council and allowing public opinion a voice in government decisions. In 1879 the government actually experimented with elective bodies when it created Prefectural Assemblies, chosen by the higher tax-payers within each prefecture. Two years later the oligarchy promised to convene a National Assembly by 1890. Ito, a former samurai from Choshu, who was eventually to become a Prince in the new nobility, had been a leading advocate of constitutional and parliamentary forms of government, and he was assigned the task of studying Western constitutions and drafting one for Japan. He toured Europe to study the political institutions of the leading powers and was most impressed by the German, which seemed to him best adapted to Japanese needs. The Japanese Constitution was finally promulgated in 1889 in the form of a gracious gift to the people by the emperor. It stated clearly that the emperor was the ​fountainhead of all authority in the state, and carefully protected his right to rule. This was natural, for the oligarchy had come to power as champions of imperial rule, and the only basis in theory for their continued authority was their status as spokesmen of the emperor, who in a sense had himself become one of the more influential oligarchs.
The great innovation of the Constitution was the bicameral Diet. There was to be a House of Peers, similar to the British House of Lords, made up of elected and appointed members of the new nobility and of a few other privileged groups, such as the highest tax-payers of the land. The lower house was to be elected by males over twenty-five who paid an annual tax of fifteen yen or more. This meant an initial electorate of 460,000, slightly over one per cent of the population at that time.
The first elections were held in 1890, and Japan got off to a belated start in the established occidental path of representative government. In 1892 the new Diet demonstrated that it was beginning to function as an important organ of government when the Cabinet resigned following a defeat in the Diet. However, it should not be assumed that Japan had suddenly become a true democracy. A group larger than the original oligarchy now participated in the work of government, and a little over one per cent of the population had the right to vote, but the young founders of the new government, now grown to solid middle age, still controlled Japan. They had become “elder statesmen,” the surviving leaders of early Meiji days, who added the prestige of long years of rule to their native political talents.
​They controlled the Privy Council and thus spoke for the emperor. Parties were formed, but they were dominated by the personalities and views of the old oligarchs. Cabinets came and went in rapid succession, but until 1918 the Premiers all came from the same small group of oligarchs or from their political protégés, who kept revolving in office in a veritable political merry-go-round. There was Ito from Choshu; Kuroda, the Satsuma samurai who had played a leading military role in the “Restoration” and also in the Satsuma Rebellion; Yamagata, the army building from Choshu; Matsukata from Satsuma; Okuma, a samurai from an important fief in northern Kyushu; Katsura, a Choshu general; Saionji, the old court aristocrat; Yamamoto, a Satsuma admiral; and Terauchi, another general from Choshu. Although the oligarchy had moved from the closed committee room to the open floor of the Diet, it still held the reins of government. Japanese administration had been westernized, but in spirit the government had hardly departed from the traditions of a paternalistic, authoritarian state.
The early Meiji leaders showed great perspicacity in discerning the importance of education in the modern state. They saw at once that a technically competent populace was a prerequisite for a modern power. The army and navy needed soldiers who could read and who knew the rudiments of Western science. Business and industry, in order to build the sinews of war, needed thousands of trained technicians.
In 1871 a Ministry of Education was formed, and Japan embarked on an ambitious program of universal education. It took time to build the thousands of ​schoolhouses required and to train the tens of thousands of teachers, but within a few years the Japanese had set up a broad educational system, embracing virtually all children of school age. Primary schooling of six years became compulsory for all. This led to Middle Schools of five years or to special technical schools for boys, and for girls to Higher Schools of four or five years. The boys’ Middle School led to various higher technical schools or to the men’s Higher School, which in turn prepared them for a University course of three or four years, producing doctors, lawyers, scientists, scholars, and candidates for higher government posts. The system was well adapted to Japanese needs, teaching the general populace to read, training a large group of technicians of various degrees of competence, and producing a small body of highly educated men for the professions and for government service.
Universal education made Japan the first country of Asia to have a literate populace. A high degree of literacy explains, as much as industrial strength and military power, the dominant role Japan was to gain in East Asia in the first half of the twentieth century. Universal education had been applied with brilliant success in Japan, but Japan, while borrowing the techniques of the West, injected into them certain strong native tendencies quite at variance with the ideals of democracy and equality which lay behind universal education in occidental countries. To Japanese leaders, education meant not the development of young minds for participation in a fuller life but rather the training of a technically competent citizenry to help build a strong state. Education was essentially a tool of government, ​training obedient and reliable subjects who could serve as technically efficient cogs in the complicated machinery of the modern state.
In the early years of Meiji, private Japanese educators and Protestant missionaries from America took an important part in developing schools for boys and girls above the primary level, but the Ministry of Education more and more asserted its authority over all schools and gradually forced them to conform to a strict pattern. The schools became increasingly a medium for teaching the people what to think rather than how to think. Thus Japan pioneered in the modern totalitarian technique of utilizing the educational system for political indoctrination and was, in fact, decades ahead of countries like Germany in perfecting these techniques.
The educational system coupled with military conscription, which fell primarily on the peasants, permitted a thoroughgoing indoctrination of the young Japanese, especially peasants, who were less likely than their city cousins to be subjected to outside influence. The peasants in late Tokugawa times, ground down by crushing poverty, had at times rioted against tax-collectors and usurers, but the heavy Tokugawa rule had made them on the whole a docile and obedient lot, perhaps even less conscious politically than their forbears of the more turbulent sixteenth century. They were easy subjects for the indoctrination they were given in schools and in the army.
In classrooms and army barracks the young Japanese was taught to glory in Japan’s military traditions. He came to believe that death on the battlefield for the ​emperor was the most glorious fate of man, and to believe in the unique virtues of a vaguely defined “national structure” and an even more vague “Japanese spirit.” Together the government and army succeeded in a few decades in creating in the average Japanese the fanatical nationalism already characteristic of the upper classes, and an even more fanatical devotion to the emperor, which had been cultivated by historians and Shinto propagandists and fostered by oligarchs around the throne. They even succeeded in convincing these descendants of peasants, who for almost three centuries had been denied the right to possess swords, that they were not a downtrodden class but members of a warrior race. Japanese political and military indoctrination was indeed thorough and spectacularly successful.
In economic life, the merchant class of late Tokugawa days naturally played an important role in developing private industrial and commercial firms. In these they were joined by the old Daimyo, whose lump sum payments had made them capitalists, and also by many samurai who had chosen business as their new means of livelihood. Japan as a whole, however, was lacking in sufficient private capital to develop adequately all the new industrial and commercial fields demanding exploitation. For this reason and probably because the government was not content with the slower and more haphazard course of private economic development, the Tokyo administration led the way in building up many of the industries and economic organs of Japan, particularly those considered essential for a strong military power.
​The government directly developed and controlled certain services, such as the railways, the telegraph system, and other public utilities, which usually proved extremely profitable from the very outset. It opened the first railway between Tokyo and its port at Yokohama in 1872. Although many other lines were built by private enterprise, the main network of railways has been in the hands of the government. The government aided many new enterprises and industries by loans or by various other means. It constructed paper-mills and cotton-spinning plants, assisted in the development of a modern merchant marine and shipbuilding industry, helped build up the silk industry, and gave aid and direction to many other essentially private enterprises.
Government financial aid and patronage for the few private capitalists of the early Meiji period contributed to a phenomenal growth of certain financial and commercial interests. Relatively small fortunes skyrocketed into great economic empires, which branched out in all directions, forming mazes of interlocking cartels and companies, all controlled by a single parent company or by a small group of financiers. The Mitsui, which in late Tokugawa times had become a wealthy merchant family, created the largest of these economic empires. Next to the Mitsui came the Mitsubishi interests, developed by a samurai family, the Iwasaki, from a merchant firm of the Edo period.
Government interest and aid in the expansion of commerce and industry also resulted in greater governmental control of the economic life of Japan than was to be found in most other lands in the nineteenth ​century. When government control of business became more common during the twentieth century, Japan proved to be in the vanguard of this world-wide economic trend; and, because of long experience, the Japanese government was better prepared than most others for periods of war in which modern governments take over complete control of almost all economic life.
As the first Asiatic land to adopt the industrial and commercial techniques of the West on a significant scale, Japan found itself in a unique position in the economic world. Western science and cheap oriental labor made an excellent combination for low-priced production. The rest of East Asia had cheap labor but as yet lacked scientific knowledge. Europe and America had scientific knowledge and far greater natural resources than Japan, but also much higher standards of living and therefore correspondingly higher wages. This discrepancy between Eastern and Western standards of living, and the lag in the industrialization of other Asiatic lands, gave the new Japanese industries and commercial enterprises an exceptional chance for rapid growth. Japanese factories and business concerns soon became adequate for the essential economic needs of the country, and Japanese business men began to push out into the markets of Asia, where the inexpensive goods made possible by cheap labor were welcomed by all the natives.
Industrialization and scientific progress slowly raised the standard of living of the average Japanese well above that of his Asiatic neighbors, but this improvement was scarcely commensurate with the rate of industrial and commercial development. This was ​probably in part because the ruling group was interested in developing a powerful nation rather than a prosperous people, but a much more basic reason was the economic drag of an impoverished peasantry and the countercurrent created by a rapidly expanding population. Japan as a nation was growing rapidly in wealth, but as a result of increasing economic opportunities and improved health conditions and medical care, the population of Japan shot up from 30,000,000 in the middle of the nineteenth century to over 70,000,000 by 1940. Because of this phenomenal growth, the per capita gain in wealth remained relatively small.
Japanese peasants at the beginning of the Meiji period eked out a pitifully meagre existence by intensive cultivation of tiny plots of land. Better seed, scientific rotation of crops, and improved fertilizers brought some increase in crop yields in modern times, and careful planning and hard labor squeezed from the soil about as much food as it could yield, but there was no spectacular increase in the per capita production of the individual farmer. In the West, mechanization of farming had made the individual farmer a large producer, but this called for an abundance of land and a minimum of labor, while in Japan there was a minimum of land and an abundance of labor. As long as the ratio of farmers to acres went unchanged, the Japanese peasant of necessity remained poor.
A large and fast growing peasantry created a superabundance of labor for industry, and the expanding labor market was always amply fed from this source. New needs for labor could be met by fresh recruits from villages and farms. Consequently, the laboring ​class kept close in spirit and often in family ties to the docile peasantry. Unemployed workers returned home to the farm, and farm girls spent years in the spinning mills, living almost like industrial serfs in company-owned dormitories. The worker endured a life of dire poverty, but the cheap labor he performed for highly efficient cartels made Japan one of the leading industrial nations of the world, unchallenged in the mass production of cheap goods.
The young reformers, who started in 1868 to make Japan into a modern nation able to hold its own on terms of equality with the Western powers, saw their ambitions realized within their own lifetimes. With the aid of a strong army and navy, an efficient government, an obedient and technically competent citizenry, and vigorous industry and commerce, they made Japan within a few short decades a world military power and won recognition of equality from the occidentals, who had in the past tended to look upon all Asia as essentially “barbarian” and outside the family of civilized nations.
During the second half of the nineteenth century, the European powers were engaged in a mad scramble to build up colonial empires by carving out new domains in Africa, Asia, and Oceania. Overseas expansion and colonial possessions were the mark of the successful power. Japanese leaders, with their samurai backgrounds, enthusiastically embraced the current imperialism of Europe and soon outstripped the Western imperialists in their determination to win colonies. They saw that poor and small Japan needed more natural resources to become a first-class world power, ​and they believed that control of adjacent territories would yield many of these resources and strengthen the defenses of Japan.
The political decay and military weakness of China and Korea made these lands ripe for foreign aggression, and Japanese leaders eagerly joined Europeans in the game of winning territories and economic privileges from the weaker regimes of Asia. In 1872, the Japanese tried out their armed forces and the European techniques of forceful diplomacy by sending a punitive expedition to China’s island dependency of Formosa to chastise the natives for having killed some sailors from the Ryukyu Islands, which were now recognized as belonging to Japan. The expedition was successful, and Japan forced the Chinese to pay an indemnity.
Two years later Japan used the same tactics in Korea that the Americans had employed against the Tokugawa. By a show of naval might, the king of Korea was forced to open his land to foreign intercourse and to sign a treaty granting to Japan the special privileges usually demanded by European powers from Asiatic states. For the next two decades the new government contented itself with intrigues in Korea to gain control of the peninsula and to force the Chinese to give up their claim to suzerainty. Men like Saigo, the Satsuma rebel, had advocated a policy of immediate military expansion, but the dominant group in the government insisted that internal reforms must come first.
Not until 1894 did Japan feel strong enough for a real test of arms. In that year she precipitated a war with China over the control of Korea. The Japanese ​easily seized Korea, destroyed the Chinese naval forces, over-ran Southern Manchuria, and even captured the port of Wei-hai-wei in China proper. The war ended in 1895. In the peace treaty China agreed to pay a large indemnity to Japan, recognized the full independence of Korea, and ceded to Japan the rich island of Formosa, the strategically placed Pescadores Islands between Formosa and the coast of China, and the Liaotung Peninsula at the southern tip of Manchuria. Japan had demonstrated that she had indeed become a modern military power, and had made a successful start in building an empire.
At about the same time Japan finally won recognition from the occidental powers as a true equal and a full-fledged member of the family of nations. Impressed by the rapid and efficient reorganization of Japanese political institutions in conformity with Western patterns, and satisfied that the new legal system was up to occidental standards of justice and humaneness, the British in 1894 agreed to surrender their right to extraterritoriality, the right exercised by most Western governments throughout Asia to have their nationals tried by their own rather than by native laws. Other Western powers followed the British example, and in 1899 Japan became the first Asiatic land to free itself of extraterritoriality. The Western nations also began to relinquish the treaty rights under which they had restricted Japanese tariffs since the late days of the Tokugawa. By 1911, Japan had resumed complete control of her own tariffs.
The Far East in modern times
Although the Japanese were infuriated by the duplicity of Germany and France, they clearly realized that Russia, dominant in Manchuria and interfering more and more in Korea, was the chief enemy that must be defeated before Japan could resume its own program of expansion in Asia. The Japanese knew that Russia standing alone would be a dangerous foe for Japan to face and that a coalition of European powers would be disastrous for Japanese ambitions. Of this realization was born the Anglo-Japanese Alliance of 1902, a military pact between Japan and the greatest naval power of the day, in which each country agreed to come to the aid of the other if its ally, while engaged in war with one power, should be attacked by another. The British were not averse to seeing their ​old rival, Russia, embroiled in a war in the Far East, and the alliance set the stage for war by giving Japan a free hand to fight Russia alone.
The Japanese, choosing their time in February 1904, set a new pattern for modern warfare by first crippling Russian naval strength in the Far East, and then declaring war. Russia was far stronger than Japan, but suffered the disadvantage of having to fight the war at the end of a single-track railway several thousand miles long. Her military operations were further hampered by revolutionary movements at home. The Japanese were consistently victorious, bottling up the Russians in the Liaotung Peninsula ports, which fell after costly assaults, and driving their other armies northward through Manchuria. Russia sent her European fleet from the Baltic Sea to the Far East, but the entire Japanese navy fell upon it in the straits between Japan and Korea and annihilated it. Although Russia was being soundly trounced, Japan was so exhausted that she welcomed the peace arranged in 1903 by President Theodore Roosevelt, who greatly admired Japanese efficiency and pluck.
In the peace treaty, Russia acknowledged Japan’s paramount interests in Korea, transferred to Japan her lease of the Liaotung Peninsula and the railways she had built in Southern Manchuria, and ceded the southern half of the island of Sakhalin, north of Hokkaido. Japan, the military ally of Great Britain, the victor over Russia, and the possessor of expanding colonial domains, had become a true world power.
Relieved of Chinese and Russian competition in Korea, Japan quietly annexed the whole of Korea in ​1910. There, as in Formosa, she embarked upon an ambitious program of economic development and exploitation, which brought railways, factories, and other outward aspects of the modern world to these lands. The Koreans and Formosans, however, were subjected to the repressive rule of an efficient but often ruthless colonial administration and an omnipresent and usually brutal police force. The natives had even less opportunity for personal economic gain than the lower classes in Japan, and their intellectual and spiritual oppression was severe.
The First World War gave Japan another chance to expand, this time with little risk or effort. As the ally of England, Japan at once declared war on Germany. Little interested in the outcome of the war in Europe, Japan happily proceeded to pick up German colonies in the East, taking Tsingtao and all the German interests in adjoining areas of China, and seizing German islands in the North Pacific, the Marianas, Carolines, and Marshalls—later given to Japan in the form of a mandate by the peace treaty. With the eyes of the rest of the world turned toward Europe, Japan also found this a good time to win more concessions from the Chinese, and in 1915, presented China with the so-called “Twenty-one Demands,” which would have made China a virtual colony of Japan. The Chinese Republican government resisted the more sweeping of these demands, but Japan managed to acquire many valuable economic concessions during the war years. The war in Europe also cut off the cotton mills of England and the factories of continental Europe from the markets of Asia. Japanese business men took full ​advantage of this golden opportunity and made deep inroads into rich markets previously monopolized by the Europeans.
War in Europe permitted Japan to expand both her economic and political empire, and brought unprecedented prosperity to the land. Only fifty years after the “Restoration,” Japan went to the peace conference at Versailles in 1919 as one of the great military and industrial powers of the world and received official recognition as one of the “Big Five” of the new international order.