the zaibatsu of japan practically ran the nation's economy over the span of many decades going into early NUMBER_TOKENs the families who owned these titanic businesses grew to possess plutocratic amounts of wealth unchecked expansionism allowed their industrial combines to become vast many economies within the japanese nation but then over a very short period of time this vast wealth and income inequality abruptly ended these families lost their control and then their companies in this video we're going to look at how japan's richest families got to be so rich how the authorities came to attack and consume their fortunes and what doing so meant for the japanese economy post-war but first if you subscribe to the channel you should also subscribe to the asian armature newsletter check out the newsletters for the full scripts as well as additional commentary after the fact you can find the link to the newsletter in the video description below or you can just go to URL_TOKEN as of right now you can expect a new newsletter every thursday at NUMBER_TOKEN am taiwan time much thanks our story begins with matthew perry and the black ships forcing japan's opening up in the NUMBER_TOKENs this traumatic event ended centuries of isolation demonstrated the massive east-west industrial gap and humiliated the country the ruling tokugawa military government attempted to close the gap and modernize the military the immense cost of doing so drained the treasury in response the shoguns debased the currency and raised taxes angering the populace including the merchants a group of samurai fearful that what was happening to china at the time would happen to japan too remove the shoguns from power this movement would be known as the meiji restoration concluding that the old regime of hereditary castes did not jive with modernization they instituted enormous changes in the country's political social and economic structure under shogun rule the hereditary samurai class reigned as local lords over fiefdoms they received fixed stipends burdening government budgets and other societal privileges the meiji leaders stripped away those privileges and converted their right stipends into government bonds some in the samurai class attempted a brief rebellion but for the most part they accepted this new society made these people being educated would competently serve as professional business managers in this new era the meiji government leaders sought to increase production and industry in order to avoid western colonization they quickly realized that if they wanted to rapidly industrialize a backwards nation entire supply chains had to be built for instance to build weapons you need iron to get iron you need to build iron foundries railways to move that iron and so on so the government founded many state-owned enterprises or soes to lead this push soes were founded in railways breweries cement textiles shipbuilding weapons and so on the goal was to make a big push towards building enough industrial capacity to replace whatever was being imported from abroad these soes were not expected to make a profit at the start so these losses had to be paid for so the government nationalized japan's minds declaring all underground minerals state property but by the late NUMBER_TOKENs it became clear that soe losses were threatening to bankrupt the government thus in the early NUMBER_TOKENs the government tried transferring these government-managed assets to private hands many of these money-losing
START_SELFPROMO_TOKEN first if you subscribe to the channel you should also subscribe to the asian armature newsletter check out the newsletters for the full scripts as well as additional commentary after the fact you can find the link to the newsletter in the video description below or you can just go to URL_TOKEN as of right now you can expect a new newsletter every thursday at NUMBER_TOKEN am taiwan time much thanks END_SELFPROMO_TOKEN