The industrialization of Japan in the 19th century played a significant role in its emergence as a major global economic power. During this period, Japan underwent a series of transformative changes, collectively known as the Meiji Restoration, which aimed to modernize and westernize the country.

Japan pushed forward with modernization, focusing our efforts on such cornerstones of national development as education, public health and infrastructure, while at the same time maintaining our treasured culture and traditions.

At the end of the 19th century, the Meiji Restoration was a symbol of the beginning of Japan's transformation from a feudal society into a modern industrial nation.

This lesson considers Japan’s domestic stories of modernization in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, with a focus on segments of Japanese society that did not immediately reap the benefits of modernization and change—people in the lower levels of the social order, particularly the peasantry (Hane 1982, 9-10).

Japan “modernized” in the late 19th century, but “modernization” meant empires and colonies as well as industrialization and representative government, leading ultimately to destruction on a scale never before experienced on the archipelago.