Episode 532 – Cash Rules Everything Around Me

Facing Backward Podcasts

This week on the Revised Introduction to Japanese History: the economics of Meiji Japan, and a brief foray into social attitudes towards Westernization. How did Japan transform itself from being largely cut off from the world economy to central to it within half a century, and what impact did all this change have on the national self-image and culture?

Sources

Crawcour, E. Sydney, “Economic change in the nineteenth century”, Sukehiro Hirakawa, “Japan’s Turn to the West,” and Gilbert Rozman, “Social Change”, in The Cambridge History of Japan, Vol V: The Nineteenth Century

Pyle, Kenneth. The New Generation in Meiji Japan: Problems of Cultural Identity, 1885-1895

Jansen, Marius. The Making of Modern Japan

Images

The Rokumeikan, or Deer Cry Pavilion.

1905 cover of “Wagahai wa Neko dearu”, or “I Am a Cat.”

The Yawata steelworks in the 1920s, a few decades after it was set up.