Military Review English Edition May-June 2016 | Page 44

ramifications, was a fundamentally conservative movement, led by capable bureaucrats, revolutionary in some respects
but merely the result of reforms in other
respects.3 Thus, Japan’s industrialization
was not sui generis. Though the Japanese
did import ideas and material from the
West, these ideas and material were interpreted and reworked by the Japanese, and
textured by their own history and culture. Consequently, in the end, on closer
examination, the West fundamentally has
had only a relatively moderate impact on
the managerial and cultural direction of
Japanese industrialization and capitalism.
Similarly, while America’s seven-year
occupation of Japan did greatly influence the country, most of the successes
Americans have a tendency to attribute to
the occupation are fundamentally Japanese,
not American, in origin. For example, did
Japan emerge as a Western-style democracy? Yes, and no. Before World War II, Japan
already had a democratic tradition of its
own that had flowered, particularly in the
1920s, during what is known as the Taisho
Democracy. Japan’s democratization after
the war is better interpreted as a return to,
and strengthening of, this tradition after
postwar demilitarization had removed the
(Images courtesy of Sonoma Valley Museum of Art)
dominant influence of Japanese militaThe organizational mindset that would serve as the foundation for the introducrists, rather than the exclusive product of
tion of heavy manufacturing and industrialization is reflected in artwork depicting
imported institutions and practices from
the step-by-step process of nineteenth-century Japanese papermaking.
the West.
system, which it then later more effectively mechanized
Did Japan become an economic powerhouse priwith imported machinery.2 More careful historians
marily because the West taught it how to do so? No.
have come to realize Japan’s rapid transformation into a
It is true by 1955, three years after the end of the
developed European-style nation-state at the end of the
relatively generous policies the United States applied
nineteenth through the beginning of the twentieth cenduring occupation to rebuild the country, Japan’s econoturies was—while impacted by the West—not a radical
my was again producing at wartime levels, and by 1968
change from the path toward modernization Japan was
Japan had the second largest economy in the free world.
already on. Both nascent industrialism and capitalism
While there are many reasons for this success—a subject
were developing and flourishing from native roots indethat has its own extensive historiography—certainly
pendent of Western influence, as was an independent
the primary reason for this success was not the material
strain of democracy.
assistance from the West, but the hard work of a well-edThe consensus of current American-written history ucated, highly disciplined populace with a high degree
of Japan is that the Meiji Restoration, with all its
of cultural habituation to community cooperation and
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May-June 2016  MILITARY REVIEW