A Tale of Japanese Technological Diffusion in the Meiji Period

Fifteen or so years ago and for many decades before that, popularly speaking, it was not uncommon to think of the Japanese as slavish imitators of foreign technology. As research workers in economic history, we recognize that slavish imitation of foreign technology is no easy matter. Foreign technical practice is hardly uniform. Choice among a number of competing technologies is hardly child's play. Young Japanese students of a century ago were enjoined to go overseas, discover what was best and make it Japanese. Such injunctions by a semi-feudal oligarchy and its intellectual supporters while progressive in spirit were naive. One process rarely dominates international industry. What was useful for the world's leader might not be appropriate for the human and nonhuman resource endowment of late nineteenth-century Japan. Initially, Japan's worldwide search led it to adopt a French-style army, an American-style banking system, and a British-style cotton textile industry. In time each of these models were either discarded in favor of other national models or otherwise modified to meet the imperatives of assimilation.