It would probably come as a shock to anyone reading this post that Japan was once as poor as the tiny African nation of Djibouti. That was in 1868. That year however, was the beginning of a new destiny for Japan. A big humiliation at the hands of the American navy a decade and a half earlier had deeply hurt Japanese pride and had led to intense soul-searching in the intervening period.
Japan emerged from that soul-searching resolutely determined to become a modern nation, and that meant being able to match the industrial capabilities of the west. A largely agrarian nation at the time with fishing being the main occupation, by 1912, Japan had become a relatively industrialized nation.
By the 1970s, it was the second largest economy in the world after the US (It has in recent years, been overtaken by China). As should be expected, such a journey was nothing less than tumultuous and gut-wrenching. What follows is the story of that journey.
Europeans first came to Japan in 1543. They happened to be Portuguese traders. Through this contact, Japan began to assimilate western culture, the most influential aspects at the time being Christianity and guns (strange combination, I know).
Guns were popular because they proved decisive in Japan’s civil conflicts. The Japanese didn’t stop at simply importing guns. They soon learned how to make them. They got so good at it that they were soon making improvements to European models and at some point in the late 16th century, may have been manufacturing more guns than any European nation.
Christianity also proved popular with sections of Japanese society. At the peak of its assimilation, there were between 300,000 and 700,000 Christians in a population of 18 million. Christianity however, was on a collision course with old Japanese values.
The results were not pretty. Now for the rulers of Japan at the time, a Japanese citizen’s highest obligation was to the rulers of the land. For Japanese Christians however, the highest obligation was to God. These irreconcilable positions led to the banning of Christianity in 1612 and a ferocious eradication thereafter.
The eradication of Christianity was just the beginning. It was the start of a long period of isolation from the rest of the world for Japan. In 1616, all foreign merchant vessels – except Chinese – were barred from all Japanese ports except two (Nagasaki and Hirado).
Foreign residence was limited to just three places, Edo (now Tokyo), Kyoto, and Sakai. In 1624, the Spanish were barred; in 1639, the Portuguese. The English didn’t wait to be barred, they just stopped coming. That left the Dutch, who other than when summoned by the Japanese authorities, were essentially under house arrest. From 1633, Japanese vessels needed official authorization to leave the country; three years later, all Japanese ships were confined to home waters.
From 1637, no Japanese was allowed to leave the country by whatever means. What’s more, if you were outside, no return, on penalty of death. In all, Japan’s isolation lasted for some 250 years.
I know this makes for very unpleasant reading for some, particularly the banning of Christianity. But on the flip side, even through this ugly incident, you can almost see why when the Japanese decided to industrialize, they made rapid progress and were extremely successful. When the Japanese set their minds to something, they go all out to achieve it. We badly need some of that mentality in Africa right now (pursuing the right ends of course).
The Japanese were brought out of their long isolation by a rude awakening. In 1853, an American navy commander by the name of Matthew Perry led a fleet of warships to the Japanese coast on the orders of the then US president Millard Fillmore. He had been sent by president Fillmore to seek a trade treaty. He carried a letter from the president to the rulers of Japan, which was really a politely worded threat that if Japan did not open its markets to American goods, Perry would use his gunboats to blast Japan into oblivion.
This kind of action was euphemistically referred to at the time as ‘gunboat diplomacy’. China had some years earlier in 1839 and some years later in 1856 had suffered an even more egregious episode of gunboat diplomacy at the hands of Britain, in what was known as the Opium Wars.
Here Britain waged war with China, fighting for the right to sell opium in China, which the Chinese authorities very understandably sought to keep out. Britain won and to add insult to injury, snatched Hong Kong from China and would not return it till 1997.
Japan, under the threat of force caved in to US demands and opened their markets but not without having their pride severely wounded. The incident led to intense debate that lasted about a couple of decades about the need to become an industrial nation, as it had been made clear that industrial power equaled military power. Of course, such a proposed change is bound to meet fierce resistance because it is almost impossible for such a change not to lead to the redistribution of political power.
On the side of reform was a Japanese samurai (member of the noble warrior class) by the name of Okubo Toshimichi, who lived in a domain in the south of Japan not effectively controlled by the Tokugawa family that ruled over all of Japan at the time.
The Tokugawas had usurped power that rightly belonged to the Emperor who they had sidelined. Okubo Toshimichi had a plan to wage war against the Tokugawas, reinstall the emperor and have him initiate the reforms that would lead to the industrialization of Japan.
He would succeed and the emperor was restored to this throne in 1868. This event in Japan’s history is referred to as the Meiji restoration. Okubo Toshimichi would be made Minister of Finance and would oversee a radical program of industrialization that at the time was the fastest that any nation had undertaken. This period, known as the Meiji period lasted up to 1912.
During this period, output of iron and coal multiplied. Steam engines were introduced to Japan. Its merchant fleet soon included hundreds of steam ships, and the country built thousands of kilometers of railway tracks. Compulsory education started, and Tokyo University was founded.
Public health and life expectancy increased. Japan, who had previously been so hostile to foreigners, would now spend about one third of its budget hosting foreign experts. They would teach subjects as varied as engineering, medicine, agriculture, law, economics, military organization, science, and many other topics.
Fortunately, pockets of the gun-making skills learnt centuries past still existed even though gun-making had been banned sometime during the isolation. These skills would prove incredibly useful to a whole range of machinery production and work with metals: screw fasteners, mechanical clocks, eventually rickshaws and bicycles. By the 1930s, Japan was the world’s largest textile exporter.
The 1930s also saw Japan flex its military muscles, having gained industrial power. During the decade it would colonize China and other East Asian neighbors like Korea. When you think of the population difference between China and Japan (about 474,800,000 for China and 64,450,000 for Japan at the time), you begin to appreciate the advantages of industrial power. All was not well with Japan though.
The 1930s would see Japan deal with plenty of economic turmoil, bringing the first phase of Japan’s rapid industrialization to an end. Then there was the onset of world war two in the 1940s, at the end of which many a Japanese found himself mired in poverty. But of all this turmoil just seemed to be merely setting the stage for Japan’s second act; its second stage of rapid industrialization dubbed “the high growth system” that occurred from the 1950s to the 70s, catapulted Japan to global economic supremacy. At the time, it was second only to the US, with great fears in the US in the 1980s that it would soon claim the top spot on the back of it having dethroned the US as the world’s number one automobile producer. You could even find traces of this fear in popular Hollywood movies of the time like Robocop III and Rising Sun.
In Japan’s first phase of industrialization, it focused mostly on light industries like textiles. In the second phase it would change orientation and focus on heavy and high tech industries, producing heavy duty machinery and highly sophisticated precision equipment.
One organization above all was responsible for this re-orientation and that was Japan’s Ministry of International Trade and Industry (MITI). Over those decades, MITI would launch a raft of targeted Industrial Policies with the intention of inducing Japan’s private sector to make the switch from light industries to the greater productivity enhancing, thus greater wealth generating heavy industries. In this MITI was supremely successful though the process was not without its pains and trial and error. MITI’s success would end up being dubbed by the world at large as Japan’s “economic miracle”.
The American fear of Japan’s eventual world domination would never materialize. Japan would somewhat lose its way in the 1990s from problems many believe to have been caused by its financial sector. This decade is often referred to as “Japan’s lost decade”. China, having made many monumental errors in its past had finally gotten its act together and was marching through highly successful reforms that had been initiated in 1978. China would eventually surpass Japan, but Japan remains a glowing testament to what visionary and determined political leadership can achieve in the face of seemingly impossible odds.
BEFORE YOU GO: Please check out my book on Amazon, Why Africa is not rich like America and Europe. Thank you
Bibliography
- Roser, Christoph. 2017 “Better, Faster Cheaper” in the History of Manufacturing: From the Stone Age to Lean Manufacturing and Beyond. Boca Raton: CRC Press.
- Yulek, Murat A. 2018 How Nations Succeed: Manufacturing, Trade, Industrial Policy, & Economic Development. Singapore: Palmgrave Macmillan.
- Acemoglu, Daron et al. 2012 Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity and Poverty. London: Profile Books Ltd.
- Landes, David. 1998 The Wealth and Poverty of Nations: Why Some are so Rich and Some are so Poor. London: Abacus.
- Johnson, Chalmers. 1982 MITI and the Japanese Miracle: The Growth of Industrial Policy, 1925-1975 California: Stanford University Press.
