with a land area approximately the size of California. For more than a thousand years, the lack of navigable rivers and roads made internal transportation within Japan very difficult. The Japanese politicians (still very much the feudal lords in attitude and power) decided that if Westernization was going to be forced upon them, they should learn what it was all about.
In the 1860s, the sons of these wealthy land owners were sent off to schools in London, Paris and Boston, where they were ordered to learn as much about Western culture as possible, and at the same time to select the finest examples of what made the West so powerful. Thus began an approach to problem solving that has been uniquely Japanese. That approach, in its simplest terms, is this: A) seek out the most attractive and potentially profitable foreign examples, whether it be building styles or political systems; B) select those foreign models that seem to be the best, and only the best; C) copy precisely the physical aspects of those models; D) adopt those models into the Japanese culture, and; E) finally adapt themselves to those models. For example, the sons of the rich landowners in the 1860s brought back reports and drawings (this was before cameras) of vast networks of roads and railroads. The newly formed government (copied from systems discovered in England and America) copied Western infrastructure by focusing their investments heavily on railroads. The first rail line was completed in 1872, running between Tokyo and Yokohama and within twenty years, the country was linked by more than 2,000 miles of track. Once transportation between cities was effected, the Japanese leaders turned their attention to transportation within cities, and in 1895, Kyoto became the first Japanese city with Trolleys.
The nation remained relatively agrarian during this period of infrastructure development. This was logical, since once a nation was linked by transpor...