How did the Meiji restoration work?

How exactly did Japan pull off the Meiji restoration? What allowed them to industrialize so fast with a late start? What actions did the government take to speed up industrialization, and what allowed this quickening of industrial development to happen?
 
In essence, it was because Japan already had the seeds of modernity within it; high literacy, a focused political class with an eye on the good of the nation (the samurai, who ultimately deposed the Shogun), and a widespread concept known as "Japan". This last is important because it replaced loyalty to a human being--such as in feudalism--with loyalty to the abstract concept of Japan. This is the seed of a national ideology, which flowered into a nigh-religious faith in the will of the government/emperor. In other words, the government was able to essentially command the nation like an army. On an economic and social level, larger farms on the part of the peasants led to an early urbanization, which provided a handy worker class. Even more importantly, political emancipation in the Meiji era was based at first on wealth, further incentivizing industrial entrepreneuership.

That is a very general overview of the Restoration. It's quite complex.
 
In essence, it was because Japan already had the seeds of modernity within it; high literacy, a focused political class with an eye on the good of the nation (the samurai, who ultimately deposed the Shogun), and a widespread concept known as "Japan". This last is important because it replaced loyalty to a human being--such as in feudalism--with loyalty to the abstract concept of Japan. This is the seed of a national ideology, which flowered into a nigh-religious faith in the will of the government/emperor. In other words, the government was able to essentially command the nation like an army. On an economic and social level, larger farms on the part of the peasants led to an early urbanization, which provided a handy worker class. Even more importantly, political emancipation in the Meiji era was based at first on wealth, further incentivizing industrial entrepreneuership.

That is a very general overview of the Restoration. It's quite complex.

Is there any way that something like this could be set in motion in China within 10 years after the Xinhai revolution?
 
In essence, it was because Japan already had the seeds of modernity within it; high literacy, a focused political class with an eye on the good of the nation (the samurai, who ultimately deposed the Shogun), and a widespread concept known as "Japan". This last is important because it replaced loyalty to a human being--such as in feudalism--with loyalty to the abstract concept of Japan. This is the seed of a national ideology, which flowered into a nigh-religious faith in the will of the government/emperor. In other words, the government was able to essentially command the nation like an army. On an economic and social level, larger farms on the part of the peasants led to an early urbanization, which provided a handy worker class. Even more importantly, political emancipation in the Meiji era was based at first on wealth, further incentivizing industrial entrepreneuership.

That is a very general overview of the Restoration. It's quite complex.

That's an excellent answer.
 
Japanese also had what might be called, for lack of a better word, a "bourgeois urban" culture in Edo that as TheLordProtector pointed out most of the country had ties to thanks to the requirement that lords live for various periods of time there. While this probably seems irrelevant, it's probably that it did contribute to the Meji by fostering a fascination with the novel, the curious, and the exotic-and just because Japan was closed doesn't mean things from outside Japan couldn't get in. Developing that sort of culture and the other things that have been pointed to by 1920 requires a rather earlier PoD-maybe even changing the collapse of the Ming Dynasty.
 
You know, Qing China's population boomed due to the adoption of foreign goods. It had an insatiable demand for certain foreign exotica, particularly luxury goods from southeast asia.

Unlike in Japan, Jesuits remained at the court into the 18th century, letting foreign ideas seep in.

So I think things are a bit more complex than portrayed.
 
In essence, it was because Japan already had the seeds of modernity within it; high literacy, a focused political class with an eye on the good of the nation (the samurai, who ultimately deposed the Shogun), and a widespread concept known as "Japan". This last is important because it replaced loyalty to a human being--such as in feudalism--with loyalty to the abstract concept of Japan. This is the seed of a national ideology, which flowered into a nigh-religious faith in the will of the government/emperor. In other words, the government was able to essentially command the nation like an army. On an economic and social level, larger farms on the part of the peasants led to an early urbanization, which provided a handy worker class. Even more importantly, political emancipation in the Meiji era was based at first on wealth, further incentivizing industrial entrepreneuership.

That is a very general overview of the Restoration. It's quite complex.

Were there many other countries that had similar advantages but didn't take advantage of them for whatever reason?
 
In essence, it was because Japan already had the seeds of modernity within it; high literacy, a focused political class with an eye on the good of the nation (the samurai, who ultimately deposed the Shogun), and a widespread concept known as "Japan". This last is important because it replaced loyalty to a human being--such as in feudalism--with loyalty to the abstract concept of Japan. This is the seed of a national ideology, which flowered into a nigh-religious faith in the will of the government/emperor. In other words, the government was able to essentially command the nation like an army. On an economic and social level, larger farms on the part of the peasants led to an early urbanization, which provided a handy worker class. Even more importantly, political emancipation in the Meiji era was based at first on wealth, further incentivizing industrial entrepreneuership.

That is a very general overview of the Restoration. It's quite complex.

The high literacy rate yes, the rest are debatable. More important was that Japan already had a well organized, sophisticated economy, with a commodeties market, banking, the proto-corporate trading houses that morphed into the Zaibatsu, a substantial craft industry with a putting out system, etc. Also, the "Dutch learning" transmitted a substantial amount of scientific knowledge to Japan.

Japanese also had what might be called, for lack of a better word, a "bourgeois urban" culture in Edo that as TheLordProtector pointed out most of the country had ties to thanks to the requirement that lords live for various periods of time there. While this probably seems irrelevant, it's probably that it did contribute to the Meji by fostering a fascination with the novel, the curious, and the exotic-and just because Japan was closed doesn't mean things from outside Japan couldn't get in. Developing that sort of culture and the other things that have been pointed to by 1920 requires a rather earlier PoD-maybe even changing the collapse of the Ming Dynasty.

The "bourgeois urban" culture of Osaka was probably more important, as most of the economic developments I mentioned above took place there.

You know, Qing China's population boomed due to the adoption of foreign goods. It had an insatiable demand for certain foreign exotica, particularly luxury goods from southeast asia.

Unlike in Japan, Jesuits remained at the court into the 18th century, letting foreign ideas seep in.

So I think things are a bit more complex than portrayed.

While there weren't Jesuits at the court, Japan was just as open to foreign knowledge, if not more so. See the Dutch learning I mentioned above.
 
Perhaps I should clarify my remarks on novelty. It's true that both Japan and China were interested in the exotic and the novel but there's a substantial difference in how these things were received that has to do I think with the urban culture of Japan. Yes, in China there were Jesuits at court like Lang Shinang but that is more on the order of a peculiar novelty. In Japan, what I see from my study of art history is that that there is more of a public sphere with an interest in the exotic and the novel. For example while there may have been Chinese imperial collections of rarities in Japan there was a custom of temples unveiling their rarities on occasion to raise money, complete with souvenier woodcuts listing the various artefacts. Likewise, to use another example drawn from art-history*, there may have been Western artists at the imperial court, but in Japan they were a visible(if minor) part of the wider public visual culture through optical peepshows and artist would duplicate the technique of copperplate engraving for this purpose.

*I realize this is not the most germane issue to how Meji Japan suceeded, but it will better illustrate what I mean by the different quality of their interest in the exotic and the novel.
 
That's an excellent answer.

Thank you.

You know, Qing China's population boomed due to the adoption of foreign goods. It had an insatiable demand for certain foreign exotica, particularly luxury goods from southeast asia.

Unlike in Japan, Jesuits remained at the court into the 18th century, letting foreign ideas seep in.

So I think things are a bit more complex than portrayed.

This is true, but it hardly helps with regards to industrialization. The Southeast Asian goods which fed demand in China hardly helped industrialization. What really doomed the Chinese, besides their conservative state ideology and massive, nigh-unmanageable size, was the state's response to the various European incursions over the course of the 19th century. Rather than attempting to defeat the Europeans by imitating them fully (as in, changing their entire state and economic structure like Japan), they used half-measures to achieve superiority without real modernization. The crux of the issue here is Confucianism, which prevented any substantial changes to the state and economic structure. In fact, I'll go out on a risky limb here and say that without the incredibly destructive nature of the 20th Century in regards to Chinese culture and society, they wouldn't have been able to reach even the meager potential they have today (which is but a fraction of their total potential). Even today, despite widespread destruction of traditional social moorings such as Confucianism, Chinese economic movers are hampered by traditionalism and a lack of state restrictions, which has led to an extremely inefficient industrial sector (similar to the 1950s in the United States). It follows, therefore, that China is not even modernized today, at least not nearly to the level Japan is. The situation, thus, is fairly straightforward.

Were there many other countries that had similar advantages but didn't take advantage of them for whatever reason?

Siam can perhaps be seen as a potential Meiji parallel. With fairly widespread literacy (not as widespread as Japan, but still) and large cities, it certainly had the potential to industrialize in the late 19th century. Unfortunately, the combination of European incursion, a feudalistic system, and a surplus of natural resources stunted its growth, though one could say it did manage to become somewhat of a late bloomer in the 20th Century. This factor should be expanded upon; like modern Russia, Kuomintang China, and arguably modern India, Siam, rather than industrializing, relied on its extremely profitable first-sector industries (agriculture, mining, forestry) to subsidize the government. Unfortunately, this left it crippled industrially (like modern Russia, Kuomintang China, and arguably modern India) and unable to compete when these first-sector industries began to produce less and less. If a far-seeing Dhammaraja (the title of the Siamese Emperor) had decided to focus on industrialization, Siam could have been the next Japan.

The Sultanate of Aceh also has potential, with its large city of the same name (it was a fairly small country), widespread literacy and a bourgeois-urban culture, to appropriate the phrase Roger II used. Its real problem was twofold; its reliance on first-sector industries rather than craftsmanship (as mentioned above with Siam), and its lack of agricultural land. This last is somewhat of a deciding factor with regards to industrialization. Without efficient mass agriculture, an industrial state cannot develop. Britain was able to do so because of the growing efficiency of its agriculture and that of Ireland, though as the population grew, food was imported. The gigantic British colonial empire also helped in regards to food. Japan, too, had efficient enough agriculture and enough land to support an industrial state (though the growing population was eventually a deciding factor in the conquest of Korea, Formosa, and Manchuria, with a view to using the three lands for food production and population overflow holders). Aceh, however, did not, most of its agricultural land being used for the production of nutmeg, pepper, cloves, and betel nuts--none of which are very useful for feeding an industrial population. If there had been more agricultural land used for basic food products, Aceh's foundations would have been much more stable and it would likely have industrialized. Alternatively, if one of the Sultans had conquered more land in the center of Sumatra, there would have been ample food to go around and they would never have been embargoed and conquered by the Dutch (which was unsurprisingly a major factor in their lack of industrialization).

I could talk about more, but I think I've been long-winded enough for now. If you want to know more, PM me.
 
In practice the Meiji Restoration reflected that the Tokugawa Shogunate (which was in reality more modern and forward-thinking than it is usually given credit for) had committed acts of domestic political suicide by blundering into incidents like Shimonosheki that wound up killing its prestige. Thus, a different set of Japanese clans deposed the Tokugawa, using civil war and a modern conscript army to defeat the older-model Tokugawa force with more modern weaponry and military structure. In practice Japanese industrial progress was both rapid and uneven, the absence of much in the way of coal helping to foster the old Japanese tradition of aggressive foreign wars to secure supplies of it.

In reality the transformational aspect of the Restoration was in a surprising sense rather superficial: it replaced a feudal, hereditary military autocracy with a more modern system that had elements of both democracy and liberalism and of ultimate military dictatorship. The crucial problem that was never resolved in the Restoration was how to develop a large conscript army and a modern navy and mesh in with this Japan's native liberal-democratic advocates.

The allohistorical difficulty, however, in preventing something like the military dictatorship of WWII Japan from this starting point is that medieval Japan was run by a number of hereditary military dictatorships, while actual liberalism in Japan ran solidly aground on what was a system that like the more conservative European and New World societies clustered purely around powerful families to the exclusion of other potential interest groups. If a military dictatorship is forestalled, it may not even be democracy that replaces it so much as an actual monarchical autocracy, where the Emperor in Japanese terms was a mixture of autocrat and mascot.
 
I think its worth keeping in mind that Japan's Industrial growth pre-WW1 wasn't all that impressive. It had a lower Per Capita income than any of the Great Powers in 1914, and only caught up with Russia's per-capita level of industrialization in 1913. It was partly the demand created by World War One that allowed Japan's industry to approach the size of the main European powers.
 
Japan also had large trading companies, some of which are the precursors of the modern industrial giants

Best Regards
Grey Wolf
 
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