AHC: Industrial Revolution in Japan

Inspired by this thread:

The PoD is Oda Nobunaga surviving the attempt on his life in 1582, going on to unify Japan (or mostly, depending) and found the shogunate (or something close enough).

From there, how does Japan get to the point where it has:

1) vast economic development in the 17th Century, that creates a wealthy, independent middle class, and economy driven by (or at least heavily involved in) commerce.

2) a combination of developed (preferably crowded) urban areas and a demand for labor so high that mechanization actually saves money, giving rise to...

3) at least one factory that uses a steam engine (or something very similar) by 1750, and making them commonplace by (or before) 1800.

Bonus points if you can make this happen even faster...

(Disclosure: This is mainly to develop an idea I had with this thread, itself somewhat ASB...)
 
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Bluntly Japan had an ASB run of luck in OTL, pushing it forward is just asking to much, also unlike Britain Japan had more forests (less need for coal) and less minerals.
 
Well, wasn't one of the reasons that the industrial revolution was centered around places like Northern England, Belgium/Northern France, and West Germany that there was a lot of both iron and coal near each other? I don't know what Japan's domestic production of those two goods is like.

Obviously you'd have to do away with isolation. That just stymied the flow of international technology.

One idea, if the Japanese invasions of Korea in the 1500s were more successful, resulting in much earlier, much different Japanese colonialism in Korea. You'd give them access to continental resources, more contact with the Chinese, and a pressingly-imperial reason to produce more.

But I think a Korean Industrial Revolution would be more interesting anyway haha.
 
Japan had iron

Its just unlike China and Western Europe it took a different technique to reach it. I don't think it was too ASB lucky that Japan managed to modernize unlike its neighbors, considering European kinda saw in them their feudal past, an orderly future of stable market to peddle goods as well as convert people to Catholicism and the constant battles between Daimyo made procuring modern weapons a must. Their craftsmen had enough knowledge to replicate them in time. What they couldn't get a hang of they would send an entourage to observe. After they managed to unify they took their colonial race theory that many Caucasians provided them hook, line and sinker to help share their "burden to bring civilization" to Formosa, Korea and especially China.

It would be interesting what different path Japan could have taken with Nobunaga or his descendants along with the shogunate still at the helm. Perhaps it would have been less militaristic but in that case they wouldn't have modernized their navy fast enough to counter Russian interests in Korea, Manchuria and Sakhalin.
 
I'm not saying it is highly plausible it will "pull a Meiji" so quickly again; but if they never shut themselves from the world they don't really need to.

Preventing the Tokugawa Shogunate would prevent Japan from ever being left behind. It might not be a major power, but it won't be colony-fodder either.

So, while I think an early and isolated industrialization is unlikely, there is no reason that under the Oda family's prime ministership and some good Emperors that the Industrial Revolution wouldn't hit them in the 18th century when it hit everyone else.
 
You don't need coal for steam power. Wood-fired boilers work just as well in generating heat...coal just packs more BTUs per ton. British use of coal/coke was born in part of the desperation caused by deforestation. IIRC most boilers ran on wood at first. Our hypothetical "Steampunk Japan" ;) can be built on wood-fired boilers. Of course once deforestation (and the massive errosion that will come of it given Japan's topography) does happen, you'll need another power source. Wait, Korea has that burny black rock, right?

As I mentioned in the mama thread, this is certainly possible. I'm not sure how much of the Japanese dislike for the merchant class was born under Tokugawa and how much was older, but in a hypothetical Japan where merchantile efforts are something no bored peacetime Samurai would be ashamed to fund or pursue Japan could conceivably grow that de facto "wealthy educated middle class" to spur private industrial growth.

It's certainly no guaranteed or even increased liklihood of an independent Industrial Revolution, but it's a possible way to fill in those "missing pieces" from OTL.

At least its a plausible path to that outcome.
 
You don't need coal for steam power. Wood-fired boilers work just as well in generating heat...coal just packs more BTUs per ton. British use of coal/coke was born in part of the desperation caused by deforestation. IIRC most boilers ran on wood at first. Our hypothetical "Steampunk Japan" ;) can be built on wood-fired boilers. Of course once deforestation (and the massive errosion that will come of it given Japan's topography) does happen, you'll need another power source. Wait, Korea has that burny black rock, right?

You've got it reversed. Steam power came about from the need to pump water out of mines. You need the demand for coal first to generate demand for improved steam engines, not wait on existing steam engines to generate a demand for coal. (what were those engines for?)
 
One idea, if the Japanese invasions of Korea in the 1500s were more successful, resulting in much earlier, much different Japanese colonialism in Korea. You'd give them access to continental resources, more contact with the Chinese, and a pressingly-imperial reason to produce more.

But I think a Korean Industrial Revolution would be more interesting anyway haha.

Actually, both of these ideas are interesting -- for the latter, maybe wars with Japan convince Korea of the need for their own modernization? ;)
 
You've got it reversed. Steam power came about from the need to pump water out of mines. You need the demand for coal first to generate demand for improved steam engines, not wait on existing steam engines to generate a demand for coal. (what were those engines for?)

You're mixing up fuel sources and needs-drivers here, xchen.

OTL steam power was developed to pump out mines, yes. That does not mean, however, that ONLY coal mining pump concerns could drive the development of steam power IATL. Theoretically anything that requires large amounts of motive force on-site where water power, etc., might not be available could spur the demand. OTL it was coal mining. ATL it could be water pumping for metal mining, or pumping water for cities or irrigation, or building a way to move supplies when some massive disease killed all your beasts or burden for that matter.

This is independent of what fuel you use to heat the water to run the engine.

For Steam Japan once some factor arises, whatever that is, to create a perceived need for a steam engine, wood-fired boilers are a perfectly acceptable technical solution.
 
For Steam Japan once some factor arises, whatever that is, to create a perceived need for a steam engine, wood-fired boilers are a perfectly acceptable technical solution.

Finding a need is rather the point. Early steam engines were crap. Even the Newcomen engine was crap. Pretty much all other energy sources were preferable. Which is why the first Industrial Revolution in Britain pretty much used steam only for pumping water out of mines since the massively inefficient fuel consumption didn't matter that much when you are right next to a coal mine, and you couldn't exactly move a coal mine to a stream for waterpower.

Wood fired boilers are not a perfectly acceptable technical solution until you get good enough steam engines. And good enough steam engines are not going to show up until not so good steam engines find a niche, and people start working up ways to improve them. Pumping water out of coal mines is one such niche. Finding a similar niche in Japan is going to be rather difficult.
 
Finding a need is rather the point. Early steam engines were crap. Even the Newcomen engine was crap. Pretty much all other energy sources were preferable. Which is why the first Industrial Revolution in Britain pretty much used steam only for pumping water out of mines since the massively inefficient fuel consumption didn't matter that much when you are right next to a coal mine, and you couldn't exactly move a coal mine to a stream for waterpower.

Wood fired boilers are not a perfectly acceptable technical solution until you get good enough steam engines. And good enough steam engines are not going to show up until not so good steam engines find a niche, and people start working up ways to improve them. Pumping water out of coal mines is one such niche. Finding a similar niche in Japan is going to be rather difficult.

Fully agree...my point is that such a niche can exist. It doesn't HAVE to be pumping water from coal mines.

You know, I think we're saying the same thing here, just misunderstanding that we are.

For Japan it's indeed hard to find the right niche...perhaps some need to produce steel en mass (invasion of the continent?). Native Japanese iron was full of sulfur and other impurities and had to be folded many times to get them out and make good steel, so perhaps such a low efficiency early steam engine could be just the thing for running a series of trip hammers (a technology the Chinese possesed), thereby lowering the number of workers needed to forge the steel.

It doesn't have to be a steam piston/boiler arrangement either. Perhaps a primitive Sterling cycle thing. The Chinese created large heat-driven piston-like armatures to move machine processes...might not be TOO much of a stretch to eventually adapt some primitive Sterling cycle concept...
 
Finding a need is rather the point. Early steam engines were crap. Even the Newcomen engine was crap. Pretty much all other energy sources were preferable. Which is why the first Industrial Revolution in Britain pretty much used steam only for pumping water out of mines since the massively inefficient fuel consumption didn't matter that much when you are right next to a coal mine, and you couldn't exactly move a coal mine to a stream for waterpower.

Wood fired boilers are not a perfectly acceptable technical solution until you get good enough steam engines. And good enough steam engines are not going to show up until not so good steam engines find a niche, and people start working up ways to improve them. Pumping water out of coal mines is one such niche. Finding a similar niche in Japan is going to be rather difficult.

Fully agree...my point is that such a niche can exist. It doesn't HAVE to be pumping water from coal mines.

You know, I think we're saying the same thing here, just misunderstanding that we are.
No, I don't think you guys are saying the same thing at all, and that Xchen is the one who's right.

The first steam engines were crap, and required HUGE amounts of fuel, basically available only at a coal mine. So pumping water from coal mines pretty much is the only first step.

If you are trying to fire a steam engine (especially one of the early ones) using wood, how long is it going to be before you burn every tree within economical transport distance? It's VERY expensive to transport stuff overland.
 
Yeah, basically, you need some industry where early steam engines are economically viable. With coal mines, fuel is practically free which makes them viable. With pretty much any other industry, you'd need every other energy source to be unusable for some reason, and the industry has to have high enough margins to cover the enormous expense of moving sufficient quantities of fuel. And if you have a stream or river to move fuel...well, you'd use waterpower instead. I really can't think of anything that fits.

The only other option is to go for the mana from the sky option where somebody comes up with an advanced steam engine completely out of the blue. I wouldn't rule it out, since I can see the requisite (widespread) materials science and precision manufacturing being developed by industries like arms production, clockwork, wind-driven pumps, etc, and brilliant independent inventors coming up with high advanced toys even without market forces driving the development is hardly impossible. You just need the unlikely event to occur, followed by another unlikely event of someone seeing the toy's potential, followed by yet another unlikely event of it catching on.

Maybe have the initial engine design come out of China, where Emperors often rewarded well for ingenious, albeit worthless, toys.
 

loughery111

Banned
I gotta go with xchen on this one as well. Simply put, he's right; the earliest several generations of steam engines, starting with Newcomen's, were CRAPPPPPPP. I think the originals ran at something like 1-2% thermodynamic efficiency; which means that literally the ONLY place where they could possibly be run as a replacement for human, animal, wind, or water-powered machinery is in close proximity to a coal mine. Which, in turn, necessitates the large-scale industrial mining of coal.

However, where you're all missing something is in the fact that the protected forest lands in Japan covered the vast majority of the total forest cover. This means that Japan's government artificially created the conditions needed for the use of coal by limiting access to the forests themselves. While these rules surely would have been relaxed some if uses for wood or charcoal were found (smelting high-quality iron and steel in large amounts, or new agricultural techniques, for instance), they were strong enough IOTL to have me thinking there's a good chance they would have been mostly kept, and cottage industries and individuals would have been looking quite desperately for other fuel sources.

Thus, coal, either bought/taken from Korea, or mined in Kyushu, would have become available sooner or later. If the former, this actually is likely to provoke an Industrial Revolution in Korea, followed by Japan playing catch-up to avoid being squished, much as France, the US, and Germany did to Britain during the 19th century. If the latter, then the same thing that happened in the UK OTL will occur in Japan around the same time...
 
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