War and the Molding of an Industrial Structure: 1930–1945

When Tanaka Umekichi passed away in the mid-1930s, Japan had been launched on a course of transformation shaped both by what it had become over 60 odd years of industrialization and by where events and its own militaristic excesses were now taking it. There could be no turning back to isolation and an idealized economic stasis sustained by traditional agriculture and native crafts. Despite the increasingly shrill calls of nationalist extremists for the country’s ‘Japanization’, the underlying mobilizing forces of change — even at the height of bellicose fervor and patriotism — were simply going in a different direction, and largely in the direction the West had set at that. The sports goods, curry powder, bicycle gears, carbon paper, ceramic dentures and hypodermic needles encountered in the previous chapter were all evidence of that, as were the country’s transportation system, its educational institutions, its police force and the plant operations and facilities of its major manufacturers, all of which owed their existence to a Western blueprint. Japan was becoming an industrial nation; by 1940 its secondary sector would account for approaching 50 percent of its net domestic production as against just over 20 percent at the start of the 20th century, while over the same period its primary sector had declined from some 40 percent to under 20 percent (Okazaki and Okuno-Fujiwara, 1999).