century, these eruptions involved thousands of people and could last several days before receding. These protests increased in intensity during the later Tokugawa period, but the regime and its social order survived despite famine, deprivation, and riots. However, from the 1860s, the Japanese people were pushed without choice into an age of industrialization. This change was related to the beginning of industrial imperialism in England, France, Russia, and the United States (Totman 2005: 283–85).
The increased industrialization was associated with the arrival of social problems, in Japan as in the rest of the world. They included destructive environmental pollution and industrial labor unrest. Pollution worsened due to the increase in mining and manufacturing during the Meiji Era. Pollution followed common patterns, such as complicity between industry and a government centered on profit and “the sacrifice of the vulnerable in the name of the greater good or some other fine principle” (Totman 2005: 339–40). The result was a tragedy: rivers, agricultural land, and people poisoned due to copper mining.
These changes were accompanied by increasing concern about the fate of the rural population, a beginning feminist interest in women’s rights, and the appearance of an intelligentsia who were knowledgeable about the radical thought developing in Europe. The social outcasts (eta) also protested against the discrimination they faced (Totman 2005: 339–40).
The workers’ protests were more widespread than those against pollution. They protested against poor industrial wages, cruel working and living conditions, and exploitative employers. Most industrial laborers worked in factories, but miners were also very important to the economy. The coal industry began in the Tokugawa Era, when rural households used their spare time for mining. During the Meiji Era, technological changes allowed deeper mining of coal and minerals, increasing the specialization of labor and reducing domestic miners to harsh poverty and sporadic employment. As profits increased, wages diminished and housing conditions worsened. Workers organized labor unions and employed socialist strategies such as strikes and sabotage, which mine owners reciprocated. One of the most infamous labor protests happened at the Ashio pits in 1907 (Totman 2005: 342–43).
Angry miners launched a violent protest that quickly boiled out of the mine to involve other poor workers in Ashio town proper. In the resulting turmoil rioters dynamited and torched many of the mine’s facilities, including sixty-five buildings lost to flames, which led to police and army intervention. (Totman 2005: 343)
The growing textile industry employed the teenage daughters of poor rural families. With the installation of factories in the 1880s, thread mills employed girls and children for long hours. Dangerous jobs in heavy industries, such as foundries and shipyards, became more mechanized, repetitive, and disciplined. These labor conditions fed worker dissatisfaction. In the 1890s, discontented industrial workers gained access to European socialist ideas and agitated for labor legislation, trade unions, and party organization.
The government tried to prevent the expansion of radicalism. In 1910, as labor unrest intensified, the government drafted a set of factory laws against objections by factory owners. The Factory Act, which was enacted in 1911 to take effect in 1916, established the minimum employment age at twelve and the maximum hours of work for women and children at twelve (Totman 2005: 343–45).
The deterioration of the rural economy led to a decline in the influence of rural elites in the government. At the same time, rapid urbanization led to protests against rising taxes, higher prices of rice, and other issues. The government and the agrarianist ideologues started to react against the rural decline and the urban protests in the 1890s, and even more so after the Russo-Japanese War. They promoted agricultural production and rural industry and established several private and government-backed village youth associations and agricultural cooperatives. They also supported local branches of the Patriotic Women’s Society, an organization that aimed to solidify the links between villages and the armed services by assisting soldiers, sailors, and their families. The government used its ties to local leaders throughout the country to control agrarian unrest (Totman 2005: 345–47).
When Japan signed Trade Agreements in 1858 and 1866, it started to engage in international trade but resisted any external economic influence and refused international loans. The politicians of the Meiji Era began pushing for rapid industrialization, since the transition from an agrarian economy to an industrial one was the only guarantee against imperialist intervention from Western nations. Japanese capitalism developed with the state as the principal entrepreneur due to the lack of commercial capital. At the beginning of the Meiji Era, rich trading families focused on traditional activities, such as trade and loans. Thus, the state raised the necessary capital through internal loans and heavy taxes on the agriculture sector (Vieira 1973: 26–27).
Japanese capitalism presented peculiarities, as the state was both entrepreneur and economic control agent. Besides this, Japan applied an unequal distribution of taxes that exploited peasants in order to modernize the non-agrarian sector of the economy. Modernization depended on the heavy new land tax. This tax worsened the gap between poor peasants and urban inhabitants and spurred the rural to urban migration for factory work (Vieira 1973: 27–28).
The government played the role of principal industrial entrepreneur until 1880, financing and controlling the nation’s transportation and communication system, mining, heavy industry, and textile industry. The Japanese state attracted private capital to invest in industry through low interest loans and generous subsidies. Governmental control of economic life was more significant than in other countries at that time. However, in 1880, the state sold all the industries except for railroad companies, telegraph, shipyards in Yokosuka, and armament factories. Thus, the state and the new capitalist class created an alliance that concentrated capital among a small group of people. At the same time, the government founded a new education system, used Western medicine, sent and financially supported students in Western countries, opened consulates, and expanded the military and marine forces based primarily on the new land taxes and on internal loans (Vieira 1973: 28–29).
In 1873, taxes upon land changed from payment in produce, which varied annually, to a fixed currency payment. Peasants found it impossible to pay this tax; they often had to sell their land, or saw their land confiscated and then rented. Several peasant revolts erupted. Compounding the problem, the peasants’ manufactured goods could not compete with the cheapest imported products. Peasants also had to deal with the loss of communal land, which was a source of wood and soil fertilizers. This struck the agrarian sector hard and compelled further migration to the cities (Vieira 1973: 29–30). Thus, similar to the British accumulation of capital (Marx 1975: 891–954), rural–urban migration was both a product and precondition of the industrial development of Japan. Peasants became the labor force of the factories.
The Expansion of the Japanese Empire
As Japan’s population increased, it spread beyond the three principal Japanese islands (Honshu, Kyushu, and Shikoku) into new areas, occupying Hokkaido in the north and Okinawa in the south. The colonization of Hokkaido started in 1872. Eventually in 1920 and 1930, it became a source of emigration to other industrialized locations and to other countries (Vieira 1973: 30).
The Ryukyu Islands (which include Okinawa) were incorporated into the Japanese empire in 1879. Once an independent kingdom with its own culture, it became a Japanese province, which exported sugar and coal to Japan. Eventually, the Japanese government promoted the emigration of Okinawans to the Japanese Pacific colonies, to Hawaii, the United States, Canada, and South America. Around 1930, more than 54,000 Okinawans were living in other countries. In 1962, there were 19,100 Okinawans in Brazil according to the General Census of the Japanese Colony. Discriminated against in Japan because they were not considered Nihonjin, Okinawans suffered discrimination in Brazil as well for several decades after the Japanese colonization. Okinawans in Brazil have had their own associations, and formed a predominantly endogenous group (Vieira 1973: 30–31).
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