The year was Meiji 3 (1871). The Meiji oligarchs, pursuing the goal of catching up with the West, were eager to import Western technology and Western experts to teach Japanese how to build and use it. But they needed something to sell to pay for the imports. Japan produced silk, and foreign traders based in Yokohama were ready to buy it. In Japan, however, silk was still a cottage industry. The irregularities in the thread caused stoppages and wastage in European industrial looms, reducing the price and thus the income generated. The new silk mill would solve that problem.

But that was just part of the story. Historically, the silk thread used by European silk textile manufacturers had been produced in France, Italy or China. Then, however, a silkworm plague decimated silk production in France and Italy, and China fell into the chaos following the Taiping Rebillion (1850-1864) and subsequent events leading to the end of the Qing Dynasty in 1911. That is why those foreign traders were in Yokohama, looking for silk from Japan. One of them was Paul Brunat, the French silk expert whom the Meiji government commissioned to find a suitable site and arrange for the construction of their new silk mill.

How, then, did the mill wind up in Tomioka, in Gunma Prefecture, instead of in Nagano or Yamanashi, neighboring prefectures were silk was also produced? Our guide listed five factors.

1. A large chunk of available land on which to build a factory. In Japan, where property rights are fiercely protected, this was a serious consideration. In Tomioka, the government already owned land, a site acquired by the Tokugawa Shogunate for a never completed military training ground.
2. Locally accessible clay suitable for bricks. Five kilometers in one direction.
3. Locally accessible coal to power steam-driven machinery. Five kilometers in another direction.
4. Water for simmering the silkworm cocoons to loosen the thread. A deep river running beside the site.
5. A welcoming local community. Here it is important to remember that foreigners were still unwelcome in Japan and the Meiji government was still on shaky ground. The Satsuma Rebellion, the last uprising of the samurai against the new government occurred in 1877, two years after the Tomioka Silk Mill went into operation in 1875, Tomioka, however, was home to several prominent silk traders already doing business with Yokohama, who saw the new mill as a chance to expand their business.

Together, these conditions made Tomioka the site of choice. Brunat, who was French, engaged a French architect working on the new imperial shipyards in Yokosuka (down the coast from Yokohama) to design the factory, which thus bears a striking resemblance to the shipyard buildings and is now one of three major historic brick structures surviving in Japan in which the bricks are laid in the French instead of the British style.

Brunat also engaged several young French engineers to install the plant’s machinery and four French women, all experienced industrial spinners, to train their Japanese counterparts. One of the women they trained became a trainer herself, traveling around Japan and training spinners for other factories that soon sprang up in other parts of the country. Her diary is now the primary source for information about the working conditions of the Japanese women who provided most of the new silk industry’s factory floor labor force.

What impresses me most about this case is the clear articulation of an historic opportunity (demand for Japanese silk due to the collapse of silk production in France, Italy and China), the availability of resources, both natural resources in and around Tomioka, and human resources, the French engineers and spinners, who, I suspect, were willing to travel half way around the world to a very strange new place because their industry at home was in the pits, the related technology, and a new government bent on catching up with the West and preventing Japan from sharing China’s fate during its encounters with Western Imperialism.

How to model these processes? Need something at least as sophisticated as Sim City. The usual sorts of simplifications to which the social sciences are prone are, alas, too simplistic.

i will read James Blaut next, as well as continue reading more of this blog. but no review of his work suggests that it will provide such an alternate model. i do hope i find something akin to what i am looking for somewhere but something tells me that maybe it doesn’t exist, or at least not in the concise form that i hope for — perhaps it is just too complex ???

In my judgment, self-determination for various peoples has been declining rapidly for at least three centuries. “Advances” in military technology, communication, beaurocratic systems, economics, etc… make it much easier for the conquerers (particularly when conquering a people with significant technological disadvantages) to squelch any meaningful independent political, economic, or scientific acitivity deemed “undesireable” that begins to arise from the conquered.

Look at Israel and Palestine. Israel very deliberately and effectively tries to keep Palestinians as “backwards” as possible, regardless of what the Palestinians wish.

In fact, keeping people enslaved nowadays is much more subtle and “clean” than it oncce was. Corporations and governments,either very secretely or subtlely, maintain hegemony over nations and regions from afar using puppet figures willing to sell out their own people for cash and ego.

If anyone is still reading this thread and has any thoughts on what I’ve said, I’d like to hear.

Leave my MacBook out of this!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guns,_Germs,_and_Steel#Criticism_of_Eurocentrism_and_determinism

Instead of Europeans being superior by their DNA, now Europeans are predestined to be superior by their ENVIRONMENT’S DNA. The “magic” remains Eurocentric, even though most major inventions prior to 1492 were NOT invented by Europeans (e.g. the wheel, cities, writing, guns, gunpowder, steel, crossbows, windmills, water wheels, geometry, castles, paper, books, printing press, magnetic compass, chariots, 360 degrees, zero, and on and on…)

Read James Blaut’s “Eight Eurocentric Historians” to see Diamond’s theory demolished point by point:
http://www.amazon.com/Eight-Eurocentric-Historians-J-M-Blaut/dp/1572305916/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1/002-0554598-3254430?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1190739339&sr=8-1

Caution: For those infatuated with Jared Diamond’s theory, your heart will be broken after reading Blaut!

Reading Jared Diamond’s books are like Apple Macs: young White males are in love with it, and the rest seem indifferent to the gushing emotion-fest that is being displayed over it.