“The Meiji reign (1868-1912) was an epoch making in the industrial history of Japan.”

The enabling reforms. The Charter Oath of 1868 promised that knowledge would be sought throughout the world. Abolition of the han in 1871 created a unified national market; the land tax reform of 1873 turned a variable rice levy into a fixed cash tax that financed industrialisation; conscription in 1873 and the education code of 1872 ended samurai privilege and built a literate workforce. The Iwakura Mission of 1871-73 sent the leadership to study Western industry.

Phase one: state-led. Private capital being scarce, the state built model factories directly — the Tomioka silk mill of 1872 — with shipyards, mines, the Tokyo-Yokohama railway of 1872 and the Bank of Japan in 1882.

Phase two: transfer to private hands. Under the Matsukata deflation of the 1880s these enterprises were sold cheaply to connected merchant houses, creating the zaibatsu — Mitsui, Mitsubishi, Sumitomo, Yasuda.

Why epoch-making. Japan became the only non-Western country to industrialise in the nineteenth century. Textiles moved from import to export, heavy industry followed with the Yawata steel works in 1901, and that base underwrote victory over China in 1895 and Russia in 1905 — which resonated across colonised Asia, India included.

The cost. Peasants bore the land tax, mills ran on the harsh labour of young women, and industrial strength was harnessed to expansionism.