class kept close in spirit and often in family ties to the docile peasantry. Unemployed workers returned home to the farm, and farm girls spent years in the spinning mills, living almost like industrial serfs in company-owned dormitories. The worker endured a life of dire poverty, but the cheap labor he performed for highly efficient cartels made Japan one of the leading industrial nations of the world, unchallenged in the mass production of cheap goods.
The young reformers, who started in 1868 to make Japan into a modern nation able to hold its own on terms of equality with the Western powers, saw their ambitions realized within their own lifetimes. With the aid of a strong army and navy, an efficient government, an obedient and technically competent citizenry, and vigorous industry and commerce, they made Japan within a few short decades a world military power and won recognition of equality from the occidentals, who had in the past tended to look upon all Asia as essentially “barbarian” and outside the family of civilized nations.
During the second half of the nineteenth century, the European powers were engaged in a mad scramble to build up colonial empires by carving out new domains in Africa, Asia, and Oceania. Overseas expansion and colonial possessions were the mark of the successful power. Japanese leaders, with their samurai backgrounds, enthusiastically embraced the current imperialism of Europe and soon outstripped the Western imperialists in their determination to win colonies. They saw that poor and small Japan needed more natural resources to become a first-class world power,