Relieved of Chinese and Russian competition in Korea, Japan quietly annexed the whole of the peninsula in 1910, without the slightest protest from any Western power. Even at that late date, it was generally accepted in the West that strong and advanced nations had the right to rule over weaker and more backward lands for the good of the colonies as well as for the benefit of the colonial masters. In Korea, as earlier in Taiwan, Japan embarked on an ambitious program of economic development and exploitation, which brought railways, school systems, factories, and other outward aspects of the modern world to these lands. The Koreans and Taiwanese, however, were subjected to the repressive rule of an efficient but sometimes ruthless colonial administration and an omnipresent and often brutal police force. Particularly in Korea, where annexation had come later and had encountered the proud traditions of a homogeneous people who had had their own centralized, Chinese-type bureaucratic state for more than a thousand years, Japanese colonial rule proved extremely oppressive and was deeply hated.
In 1914 World War I gave Japan another chance to expand, this time with little risk or effort. As the ally of Britain, it soon declared war on Germany. Little interested in what happened in Europe, Japan happily proceeded to pick up German colonies in the East, taking Tsingtao on the Chinese coast and all the German interests in the surrounding province of Shantung, and seizing the German islands in the North Pacific—the Marianas, Carolines, and Marshalls—which were later assigned to Japan in the form of a mandate by the Versailles 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 China and, in 1915, presented it with the so-called Twenty-one Demands. Although the Chinese succeeded in resisting the most sweeping of these, which would have turned their country into a virtual protectorate, Japan did win broad new economic rights in Manchuria, Shantung, and the coastal province of Fukien opposite Taiwan.
Thus, only fifty years after the Restoration, Japan in 1918 emerged from World War I as Britain’s chief rival for domination in China. It went to the peace conference at Versailles as one of the Big Five among the victors, an accepted world power. The Meiji leaders, who had set out in 1868 to create a Japan that would be militarily secure from the West and fully equal to it, had, within the lifetimes of their more long-lived members, done exactly that. Few generations of political leaders anywhere have proved so fully successful in attaining their goals.
10
ECONOMIC AND POLITICAL GROWTH
Japan’s development as a military power was not just matched by its great economic advances but was, in large part, based on them. Starting with the boom in cotton spinning in the 1880s, Japan succeeded in the light industries in one new field after another. The Sino-Japanese War with its indemnity and even the exhausting Russo-Japanese War proved to be strong stimulants to the economy. World War I was even more of a boon, because it cost Japan little but gave it the markets of Asia cut off from the factories of Europe by the war. Japanese businessmen took full advantage of this opportunity to make deep inroads into rich markets previously monopolized by Europeans.
As the first non-Western land to adopt the industrial and commercial techniques of the West on a significant scale, Japan found itself in a unique position. Western technology and cheap Oriental labor made an excellent combination for low-priced production. The rest of Asia had cheap labor but as yet lacked technical skills; Europe and North America had high technology and far greater natural resources than Japan, but also much higher standards of living and therefore correspondingly higher wages. This discrepancy between Oriental and Occidental standards of living and the lag in the industrialization of other non-Western lands gave the new Japanese industries and commercial enterprises an exceptional chance for rapid growth. Producing for its own relatively poor citizenry and for the even poorer populations of the rest of Asia, Japanese industry became particularly oriented toward cheap and sometimes shoddy consumer goods. Textiles accounted for more than half of factory employment at the end of the nineteenth century and predominated in the export trade. Heavy industries such as steel and shipbuilding were developed to some extent, but largely for strategic reasons. It was not until the 1930s that the Japanese could begin to compete with the much more industrially experienced Western nations in these fields.
Japan found itself provided with an ample and competent supply of labor. The poorer classes were already familiar with working for wages, and Japan’s relatively advanced traditional industries had made them skilled workers. Modern education made them even more valuable. The population, responding to modern medicine and transport facilities, doubled to 60 million within a little over a half-century after the Meiji Restoration, and rural Japan, already saturated with people in the Tokugawa period, became a seemingly inexhaustible reservoir for cheap urban labor.
The contrast with the United States was sharp. There the mechanization of farming released workers for urban labor, but at the same time greatly increased the scale and prosperity of agriculture. This pattern was possible only where land was abundant and labor scarce. In Japan there was a minimum of land and an abundance of labor. Since there was little unused land, except in Hokkaido, and the average size of a farm in the other islands was only 2.5 acres, the increased rural population had to drain off to the cities. But the new industries could not grow fast enough to absorb it all; thus rural areas remained saturated with people, and city wages remained inexorably tied to the inevitably low living standards of Japanese agriculture. Farm girls between the termination of their schooling and marriage in their twenties became the bulk of the workers in textile mills. Herded into dormitories, they provided a cheap but docile and efficient working force. Younger sons, forced to migrate to the cities, became in time a more permanent urban working class; but tied as they were to their rural backgrounds, and returning to their old homes for subsistence in hard times, they were at first little more than an urbanized peasantry.
Japan’s great industrial success thus did not bring a rapid rise in living standards for the lower classes. Population growth was too great, and the drag of a dense, impoverished peasantry too strong. All classes did benefit from cheaper and better manufactured goods, such as inexpensive cotton cloth, rubber-soled footwear, rubber boots, and bicycles, and they also benefited from modern services, such as public schooling, improved medicine, electric lighting, and cheap and convenient railway service. The rapid descent of Japan’s numerous though small rivers was fully exploited to bring electric power to all corners of the land. Municipal water and gas systems and streetcar networks were developed in cities. But there was little improvement in such basics as food and housing.
Another reason why the masses failed to share fully in Japan’s tremendous growth was that the government, like those of the West at that time, was concerned more with national power than the equalization of wealth. It permitted and even encouraged the heavy concentration of private wealth in the hands of a few individuals. One reason for this situation was Matsukata’s economic policies in the 1880s, which had given a relatively small group the chance to get hold of most of the more promising new industries. A more important reason was the continuing government policy of channeling business and financial aid to those they regarded as best able to build the economic sinews Japan needed. Since these were often men with whom the government leaders were closely connected by previous background or marriage, much of this favoritism would be judged scandalous by contemporary standards. For example, Iwasaki got his start in building up the Mitsubishi interests through ships and funds provided by the government in connection with the Taiwan campaign of 1874 and the Satsuma rebellion of 1877. But scandalous or not, such collusion between government and private business interests did help to produce rapid economic growth.
This situation resulted in a relationship of cooperation and trust between government and big business, which stood in sharp contrast to the American tradition of suspicion and hostility betwe
en the two. Japanese businessmen readily accepted guidance and control from the government—this, after all, had also been the situation in Tokugawa times. Now guidance and control took modern forms, such as mergers and cartels sponsored or encouraged by the government. The Mitsui and Mitsubishi shipping interests, for example, merged in 1885 to form a single strong Japanese shipping enterprise more capable of competing with Western shipping lines. Similarly, the cotton spinners, in order to strengthen their hand in buying cotton on the world market, formed a strong cartel in the 1890s under Shibusawa’s leadership. The net result of such mergers and cartels was that the Japanese showed more conscious effort and greater skill in shaping the national economy than had as yet been shown anywhere in the West.
Under these conditions, the individual economic enterprises grew to be huge and powerful. Mitsui, Mitsubishi, Sumitomo, and Yasuda were the four largest and set the pattern for the unique Japanese institution of the zaibatsu combines, or conglomerates as they might be called today. Commonly there was a central, family-owned “holding company,” which, through large blocks of shares, controlled major industrial and commercial firms, which in turn controlled lesser affiliates. A zaibatsu combine was not concentrated in a single field, as were the great business enterprises of the West at that time, but was spread throughout the whole of the modern sector of the economy. Combines usually centered around great banking institutions, but they were also likely to include manufacturing, mining, shipping, and foreign trade. This last was in the hands of a general trading company (sogo shosha), a purely Japanese innovation. The trading companies developed great networks of foreign contacts and gathered information in order to sell and purchase a wide variety of goods abroad and perform various other services connected with foreign trade, which most individual firms would not have had the facilities to perform for themselves.
The structure of a zaibatsu combine was not unlike that of the Tokugawa bakufu, with its fiefs and subfiefs. There were feudal overtones in the personal relation within the combines as well. Loyalty was strong, since young businessmen joined a combine for life and rose by moving among its various units. A system of interlocking directors further strengthened solidarity. The system of lifelong careers within a single economic enterprise also began to extend in the early decades of the twentieth century to the central core of skilled workers, who were seen as a valuable commodity. They too came to enjoy lifetime job security, and their loyalty to the firm was further ensured by wage scales that increased with length of service. This pattern of job security and salaries determined by seniority for both management and labor came in time to be one of the most distinctive features of Japanese business enterprises as compared with those of the West.
The great wealth and broad base of the combines enabled them to finance promising new fields in the economy and thus increase their share in its fast-growing industrial sectors. It gave Japan the concentration of risk capital needed for long-range investments in risky new fields. The zaibatsu families, apparently influenced by Confucian and feudal Japanese values, proved to be conspicuous underconsumers. Unlike the wealthy in some developing lands, they did not go in for yachts, foreign bank accounts, and villas abroad, but assiduously plowed back their profits into expanding their economic empires. The common people, largely through post office savings accounts, also showed a comparable propensity for saving that has continued to the present day.
UPI/Bettmann Newsphotos
Downtown Tokyo before the 1923 earthquake.
Despite their acceptance of government guidance and leadership, the zaibatsu developed great rivalries with one another, and the competition between Mitsui and Mitsubishi came to be legendary. The zaibatsu also became increasingly influential in politics. Because of their size, the government had to pay attention to their views, and the political parties began to look upon them as their major means of financial support. In the 1880s, even before there was a Diet, the parties were accusing each other of being the pawns of Mitsui or Mitsubishi, and it was commonly believed that the political line from which the Seiyukai grew was tied to Mitsui, while the other major political line was popularly associated with Mitsubishi.
The basic role of the zaibatsu in Japanese history has been a highly debated subject. One view is that their drive for international trade caused Japan’s modern imperialism, but this interpretation seems exaggerated. On the whole they preferred peaceful trade abroad and lower taxes at home. Their great size made them unwieldy and therefore economically inefficient in some ways. Quite clearly their concentration of private wealth proved unhealthy for the nation’s social and political development. At the same time, their ability to undertake long-range investments in order to open up promising new economic fields and their heavy reinvestment of capital in economic expansion undoubtedly helped account for Japan’s extraordinarily rapid industrial growth.
Japan’s rapid economic, political, and military rise was accompanied by great social and intellectual changes that occurred in a much more confused and uneven way. Between 1890 and the 1920s the percentage of the population in cities and towns rose from slightly over 10 percent to close to 50 percent. Such changes involved basic shifts in life styles and in attitudes. A fully literate citizenry was emerging, and higher education increased almost tenfold between 1900 and 1940. A strong, self-confident business community was developing, as well as a huge new urban class characterized by the well-educated white collar worker, who came to be called the “salary man” (sarari-man) and became in time the basic Japanese self-image.
A second post-Restoration generation was appearing, purely the product of the new education and lacking entirely the old background, with its shared feudal and Confucian values. The original Meiji leaders, coming from a uniform and stable background, had never doubted their own Japaneseness or the primary national goals of security from the West and equality with it. But these goals had been achieved, and the new generation, with its more varied experiences, was not agreed on what the new goals for Japan should be. They were torn between the Japanese environment in which they lived and their education, which was largely focused on the West and its technology. They were subject to diverse and often conflicting intellectual influences. Their more specialized training led individuals to different careers and contrasting points of view. They were less sure than their predecessors just who they were and what Japan’s role in the world should be—questions that have bothered the Japanese periodically ever since.
The early popularizers of Western ideas and institutions, such as Fukuzawa, had spread concepts of English utilitarianism, Social Darwinism, and the philosophy of Rousseau. Some of the able young samurai, largely from the parts of the country that had had no share in the Meiji revolution and the political leadership it produced, eagerly embraced Protestant Christianity as a substitute for discredited Confucianism. They created a strong native church that, together with the missionary educational institutions, gave Christianity far more intellectual influence in Japan than one would have expected from the number of its adherents, which never exceeded 1 percent of the population in modern times. Uchimura Kanzo, a Christian stalwart whose “No Church movement” consisted of an unstructured group of Christian intellectuals who rejected the sectarian divisions of Western Christianity, became a nationally prominent advocate of pacifism and helped establish Christian values as a liberal alternative to the official government ideology. In particular, Christianity emphasized the Western concept of individualism, which ran counter to the Japanese tendency to subordinate the individual to family and group solidarity. Christians also led the way in fostering higher education for women and in various efforts at social welfare work.
In sharp contrast with these Christian influences, the swing back toward Japanese values in the 1880s produced new ultraconservative trends of thought, and the standard philosophy of the government higher schools and universities came to be based on Hegel and the German type of idealism. Socialist thought al
so began to creep into Japan. At first it came largely through some Christians who, returned from study in the United States, took the lead around the turn of the century in trying to start labor unions and a Socialist party, which was immediately suppressed. A Christian revived the labor movement in 1912 and another tried to create tenant unions in the 1920s. Throughout, however, there had also been non-Christian socialists and anarchists, and following the Russian Revolution of 1917, Marxist influences became predominant in both the labor and socialist movements, though an identifiable Christian element survived until well past World War II.
In a now fully literate society, the vigorous mass media became the center of public opinion, which was by now broad and strong enough to influence national policy. This could first be detected in the strong popular demand for revision of the “unequal treaties,” which swept Japan in the decade before 1894 and made the negotiations for ending the treaties all the more difficult for the government. Mass public opinion was even clearer in the vast outpouring of patriotic fervor during the wars with China in 1894–1895 and with Russia in 1904–1905. At the close of the Russo-Japanese War, public feeling erupted in violent riots against the government, which the people, unaware of Japan’s near collapse, believed had betrayed the country by not obtaining an indemnity from Russia. Again in 1918, serious rioting broke out all over the country against the high price of rice. Clearly public opinion had become a force to be reckoned with.
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