The Industrialization and Modernization of Japan
Japan as a World Power Player has only been on the international scene since 1853, which was the year that US Naval Admiral Oliver Hazard Perry parked his fleet of gunboats in Tokyo Bay and ordered the reclusive Emperor to abandon its 250 years of splendid isolation and accept the philosophy of the West. Seldom has a country's historical record had such a clear and jolting turning point (Mallaby, 1994, J-3).
Before that historic year, Japan was literally frozen in feudalism, a country where lords were bound to each other by ties of vassalage and where peasants surrendered part of their crops as feudal dues. After that year began a period of "Western awareness" unequaled in any study of the importance of economic geography. This discussion will trace the relentless modernization and industrialism of Japan by dealing with the country's turning points while also attempting to show the cause-effect nature of Japanese history since 1853, which basically ignores the Japanese nation's previous 2,000 years of history.
Four time periods, or epochs, have been selected for the purposes of this analysis. Each has been provided with a descriptive name in order to easily identify it over the course of the analysis. It should be noted, however, that the epoch names are subjective, being an attempt to arrive at some semblance of understanding concerning this country that in less than fifty years has gone from infrastructure destruction to a place as the second most-powerful economy in the world. The turning point epochs are: the Meiji Epoch (roughly 1853 to 1920); the Aggressive Epoch (roughly 1920 to 1945); the Apology Epoch (1945 to 1965); and the Schizoid Epoch (1965 to the present).
At the beginning of this epoch, Japan was practically a case study in the important impact of geography on a nation's development. The Japanese nation is a string of some 1,400 mountainous islands ...