Japan is said to be the only country among people of color that succeeded in modernizing through the industrial revolution. So why was only Japan able to succeed?
Japan has been isolated from the rest of the world for over 200 years, and we are generally taught in school that modernization began with the opening of the country. What exactly is the industrial revolution? The industrial revolution can be thought of as a power revolution.
Steam engine improved by Watt
Watt in England improves the steam period and creates a machine that converts the power of steam into rotary motion. This was a revolutionary invention at the time. He will be able to transmit rotational motion to various gears and realize complex movements in various locations. So, what was the machine like up until then? It was similar to how humans and cows rotate their shafts, or when they step on a loom with their feet to obtain rotational motion.
This is the power of steam, and if you keep the fire burning, you can get an output many times greater than human power. What this achieves is mass production of products.
From handicrafts to an era of machine-based mass production
Until then, it was called a cottage craft industry, and as the name suggests, people made things by hand, but from now on, we will enter an era in which machines will be making large quantities of the same items.
This is the industrial revolution. Products manufactured in large quantities are cheaper and become popular among various classes. Steam locomotives also provided the infrastructure for transporting these large amounts of goods. From this era, the demand for coal to generate overwhelming thermal power increased explosively.
Japan had high-level metal processing technology.
So, why did Japan succeed in the industrial revolution? Japan already had the technology to make these machines by watching and copying. During the Edo period, techniques were honed and improved as a traditional craft during the apprenticeship system, and the sword culture continued for a long time, making iron processing technology one of the best in the world. has in the metal processing field. Unlike human power, steam engines produce overwhelming power, so wooden machines would easily break. In other words, even the smallest parts of various machines must be made of metal and assembled. When Japanese people saw Western industrial machinery, they may have simply thought, ``Oh, I think I could make something like this.''
Clocks were already created in the early Edo period.
One reason is that Japanese people are good with their hands, but clocks were the most precise gear-based machines of the time. It is said that Japanese clocks were already created in Japan during the era of Tokugawa Ieyasu. Currently, Japanese clocks have a reputation for being the most accurate and unbreakable in the world, but these technologies were not invented yesterday.
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Meiji Restoration that created civil society
There is another thing that Japan achieved that was necessary for the industrial revolution. It is a departure from the feudal system. In the West, a civil revolution had already taken place, and the industrial revolution began more than 100 years later. Free citizens were already active during the Industrial Revolution, and their lives were not tied to feudal lords or land as in the feudal system.
In other words, when wealthy people at the time started a company that mass-produced products using industrial machinery, they could recruit and hire employees.
This is the proletariat, and a mobile labor force is essential to the industrial revolution. The Meiji Restoration was truly a revolution that destroyed the feudal Edo shogunate system and created a civil society.
Simultaneously carrying out social reform and industrial revolution
The Japanese at the time were able to accomplish something that had never been seen before in the world: they simultaneously carried out an industrial revolution. Then, if you think about why other countries of colored people were unable to modernize, it can be said that it is because these two points were not met. One is metal processing technology. The other is the formation of a civil society, which means breaking away from feudal society.
Modernization under colonial conditions is difficult
In the first place, Southeast Asian countries and other countries of color were all colonized by the West from the latter half of the 15th century, so it is difficult to imagine that the countries under colonial rule would be able to achieve the industrial revolution that first occurred in the West in the late 18th century. It's impossible to say so. For example, what if we look at the neighboring countries of China and the Korean Peninsula?
China and Korea failed to modernize
China also has a sword culture, and has a long history of using iron tools. However, they were unable to break away from feudalism. As for the Korean peninsula, Korea did not have the technology to make needles and wheels, so they imported them from China. What this means is that the needle meant that people didn't have fine metalworking skills, and the wheel meant that people didn't know how to bend wood into rings, so they didn't know how to move things. It was carried on the back of a person, carried by a person, or placed on their head. In other words, it is impossible to improve the efficiency of infrastructure, and in the first place it is impossible to make the gears in industrial machinery or perform detailed metal processing.
The Korean Peninsula was fatally lacking in elements.
What was fatal on the Korean peninsula was that the class system was exactly as it was before the Middle Ages, and it was a distorted society with 40% slaves, so talk of a mobile labor force was a thing of the future. . In order to firmly protect this old Korean society, the aristocratic class, the yangban, completely eliminated various reforms for modernization. It can be said that both were fatally lacking.
At the center of the world table in just 51 years
Only 27 years after the Meiji Restoration, Japan defeated the Qing Dynasty, which was considered a major power, and 10 years later defeated Russia. After World War I, Japan sat at the table at the center of the world as a permanent member of the League of Nations in 1919. This was only 51 years after the Meiji Restoration. In this way, Japan was the only people of color to achieve modernization, and the idea was to spread this wave to Asia.
Sun Yat-sen, who brought about the Meiji Restoration in China
Sun Yat-sen's Xinhai Revolution was made possible with Japan's support, and Sun Yat-sen, who founded the Republic of China, believed that Japan's Meiji Restoration was the cause of the Chinese Revolution, and that the Chinese Revolution was actually the result of the Restoration. I'm making a statement. During his exile in Japan, Sun Yat-sen took the name Sun Yat-sen and was a person who learned about Japan's modernization. There was a man named Kim Ok-gyun on the Korean peninsula, but the revolution in Korea ended in failure, and Kim defected to Japan. However, when he went to Shanghai, he was assassinated by an assassin sent from Korea. It is ironic that just four months after Kim Ok-gyun's death, the Sino-Japanese War began, resulting in the independence of the Korean peninsula and the beginning of reforms toward modernization.
History that obscures the process of Asian modernization
As a result, China started the Xinhai Revolution in 1912, 44 years after the Meiji Restoration, and the annexation of Japan and Korea began 42 years after the 1910 Meiji Restoration. In fact, as Asian countries eventually achieved independence after the war, the process of modernization was necessary in any case, but it is worth noting that Japan was the only country of color to achieve this. However, it is clear that the modernization of Asia was derived from Japan's Meiji Restoration, and in this regard, China, the Korean Peninsula, and Japan, without exception, have recognized this important process within the theme of mod
