This week's premium article: How Japan Redrew Asia
This is the 8th and final article of the series about Japan. Previous ones:
Why Japan is so populated (free)
Why Japan is the first big economy to shrink its population (premium)
Why Tokyo is the biggest city in the world (paywalled)
Why the imperial capital was Kyoto, and why it moved to Tokyo (premium)
Today, we’re going to explain the crazy trajectory that the country has followed over the last 150 years:
Why was it the only non-Western country that built an empire during the Industrial Revolution?
How did it become the 2nd richest country on Earth?
Why has it stagnated in the last three decades?
Why is it so indebted, but pays so little in interest?
Why Was Japan the Only Non-Western Country That Built an Empire during the Industrial Revolution?
The entire sequence is surprising here:
Why was Japan the only non-Western country to join in on the Industrial Revolution in the 1800s?
Why did it take advantage of it to build an empire?
Japan’s Unique Proto-Industrialization
In 1900, eight countries fought side-by-side to attack China during the Boxer Rebellion. Find the odd one out: Germany, Russia, Britain, France, the United States, Italy, Austria-Hungary, and Japan. This is shocking, right? A non-Western country marching in the same alliance as seven Western industrial powers?
In the late 1800s, Europeans had made contact with the entire world, but the only outside country that industrialized out of that was Japan.1 Why? Because it had a set of unique characteristics.
To industrialize, you need:
A surplus of food, to allow for a big chunk of the population to not work in farming
Some light industries that could serve as stepping stones to heavy industries
A big urban population that can be brought into factories
Fast transportation
Widespread trade
High literacy and a class of literate administrators
Japan had it all.
We saw how geography brought it the food and the urban population: great fertile plains in a good climate for double cropping, but limited enough so people couldn’t just expand by farming more land, forcing urbanization and specialization into trade. By the mid-1850s, Japan was already very densely populated, with a very high urbanization rate.
As a set of islands with its Seto inland Sea, it was well-situated for fast and cheap transportation. Tokugawa Japan developed transportation on the east and west coasts too, in the Pacific and the Sea of Japan. As the country had been unified and tolls eliminated, Japan also developed roads that allowed short-distance trade of goods and fast communication.
The political unity, good transportation, and high urbanization all helped trade flourish.
All these elements also enabled light industries: textiles, silk, paper, sake, etc.
And the class of samurai had spent 250 years forgetting to fight, because there was just no need. They replaced the katana, horse, and gun for the pen and became administrators.2 The entire country had high literacy, but the samurai class had an exceptionally high one for the time.
Of course, the question becomes: Why did Japan gather these assets and no other country did?
The Britain of Asia
Nick Szabo noted the surprising parallel between Japan and Britain.
Both are islands, neither too big nor too small. They are pretty mountainous, creating several valleys in between and competition between their different rulers. They are close enough to the continent that they could receive plenty of technology. But island geography also made defense unusually efficient: Britain and Japan could concentrate defense at maritime chokepoints rather than have to defend vast land borders.
This also meant that agricultural productivity could be high, because farmers were more secure in their land. They could invest in their long-term improvement, knowing that nobody would come and steal the fruits of their labor. Compare that with Ukraine, for example, which was so exposed to horse-mounted hordes that it invested substantially less in farming.
Thanks to this security, both countries established property rights that allowed landowners to affirm and trade their properties, which increased their value, and justified more investment.
So both Britain and Japan in the 1800s had high homeland security thanks to their geography, which had brought conditions that favored agricultural investment, which increased agricultural yields, which increased the population, which allowed for urbanization, which fostered trade and industrialization.
And since both were secure, they could invest part of that surplus not in more soldiers, but in education, and the administrators needed for industrialization.
This section is a hypothesis, but now that I think about it, a lot of these conditions remind me of the US and Italy too. They’re not islands, but close,3 they’re well defended, had many valleys that fostered competing rulers,4 but were connected enough that they could be unified, and plenty of farmland to produce a surplus of people.5
Japan’s Unique Reaction
So Japan was in a unique position to industrialize, but it had to decide to do it. It lived in a feudal system when the Europeans arrived, but rather than dragging their feet, the Japanese recognized the threat and replaced their political system extremely quickly.
China again is a good comparison: It had a big population, cities, trade, taxation, good transportation, high literacy, a huge administration… The ruler could have identified the Western threat in the First Opium War but didn’t. Why did Japan, but not China?
I think it’s again due to the unique geography of Japan: Having all these separated plains in mountainous and elongated islands allowed for political independence. They were all one country, but each lord (daimyo) could manage his lands differently, make different bets, and create some local power. This was crucial to overthrowing the Tokugawa shogun and ushering in a new government system, copying the West.
Why Did Japan Pursue an Empire?
Once you follow all of the above, pursuing an empire becomes pretty easy to understand:
Japan’s geopolitical priorities: Japan wanted to secure the five gates leading to it.
Japan saw how Western powers were becoming powerful by creating empires. Japan could either eat or be eaten, and it chose to eat.
There’s probably a status question too. Japan industrialized by copying the West. And the West was creating empires, which gave them status. Why not copy them?
After WW2, though, Japan was completely destroyed. How did it become the world’s 2nd biggest economy? And then, after growing for so long, why did it start stagnating? Because the very assets that made it rich became a liability.
