Anonymous B joined in and replied with this 3 hours ago, 2 hours later[^][v]#1,427,150
Was looking for videos on imperial Japan that were about industrialization instead of war crimes that didn’t have an annoying narration voice or orientalist "wow look at their culture, look at the bushido code, they were brainwashed to die for the emperor but they westernized. Wow the adopted western ideas, aren’t western ideas amazing?"
I literally just wanted to find some video about Japanese steel mills. I have no idea why.
Anonymous B double-posted this 3 hours ago, 3 minutes later, 2 hours after the original post[^][v]#1,427,151
Idk every video I’ve found on the subject either than that one seems to be along the lines of, "Japan realized they were behind during the Meiji restoration. Emperor Meiji told everybody to industrialize. Now Japan has tanks and warships." But that’s not a great answer, it’s like, yeah but how though? What did they do? What were the logistics about that? But if you look into the US there are figures like Andrew Carnegie for example where you can point to actual industrialists who did specific things and they’ll talk about the actual monopolistic strategies those industrialists used, and it’s like a thing. I feel like I’m interested in the logistics of how Japan industrialized before World War Two and I’m not really sure why, I’m just wondering about it for some reason.
> Idk every video I’ve found on the subject either than that one seems to be along the lines of, "Japan realized they were behind during the Meiji restoration. Emperor Meiji told everybody to industrialize. Now Japan has tanks and warships." But that’s not a great answer, it’s like, yeah but how though? What did they do? What were the logistics about that? But if you look into the US there are figures like Andrew Carnegie for example where you can point to actual industrialists who did specific things and they’ll talk about the actual monopolistic strategies those industrialists used, and it’s like a thing. I feel like I’m interested in the logistics of how Japan industrialized before World War Two and I’m not really sure why, I’m just wondering about it for some reason.
Japan played Western powers against each other for trade and military and industrial tech. The government built zaibatsu conglomerates and handed them off to civilian businesses. It was all state-driven to avoid becoming a Western puppet nation.
There are books like Jansen’s “The Making of Modern Japan” that get into this in depth.
Japan entered the war without sufficient oil or ore. Hence the Manchuko puppet state in Manchuria helmed by impotent last emperor Pu Yi.
> Japan played Western powers against each other for trade and military and industrial tech. The government built zaibatsu conglomerates and handed them off to civilian businesses. It was all state-driven to avoid becoming a Western puppet nation.
This seems like a major paradox of developing nations, especially in Africa. If you want to industrialize a you let the private sector do it, it will just get eaten up by western companies that extract all the profits for foreign nations that are already rich. But if you let the government do everything, governments tend to be slow, corrupt, sometimes incompetent. The US and China seem like they each reached two different equilibriums between government and private industry. In the US, originally, a lot of the development seems like it was done by monopolists, but the government retained enough power to break up those monopolies (now I bet they wouldn’t be able to do that). Then in China, they have a form of state capitalism where the government retains control of everything, but they don’t necessarily micromanage every minute detail like the Soviet Union did.
Anonymous D double-posted this 2 hours ago, 3 minutes later, 4 hours after the original post[^][v]#1,427,174
It seems like unfortunately there’s a correlation between a nation controlling its own resources and authoritarianism though. If you let everybody do what they want in a democracy, outsiders come and eat everything. So the most anti-western African governments in the Sahel region tend to be pro Russian military juntas. There are some exceptions like how post war Japan developed as a democracy, but with the cost of a permanent American military presence, which doesn’t seem ideal.
Anonymous D triple-posted this 2 hours ago, 1 minute later, 4 hours after the original post[^][v]#1,427,175
I think that’s also part of why racism is so appealing, instead of saying Africa and India are failures of democratic capitalism and western ideas implemented in cultures where they don’t work white people can be like, "Oh they’re just stupid" or whatever.
Anonymous D quadruple-posted this 1 hour ago, 5 minutes later, 4 hours after the original post[^][v]#1,427,178
Which is also crazy because the US bombed Nigeria which is opposed to the pro Russian / anti western military juntas but the west kinda sees all African countries as the same so they don’t care if Nigeria is more pro-western than their neighbors so China will probably end up gaining ground over stupid stuff like that.