Early industrial Japan did marvelous things. It accomplished something unique: transferring enough industrial technology outside of the charmed circles of the North Atlantic and the temperate-climate European settler economies. Ever since, politicians, economists, and pretty much everybody else have been trying to determine just what it was Japan was ale to do, and why. But it was a low-wage semi-industrial civilization, economizing on land, materials, and capital and sweating labor: Pietra Rivoli (2005): The Travels of a T-Shirt in the Global Economy: An Economist Examines the Markets, Power, and Politics of World Trade (New York: John Riley: 0470456426) https://books.google.com/books?isbn=0470456426: "Female cotton workers in prewar Japan were referred to as 'birds in a cage'...
...given their grueling schedules—12-hour days and two days off per month—and captive lives in the company boardinghouses. In most cases, the operatives were bound to the mills for a three- to five-year period, in a contractual arrangement not unlike indentured servitude. In these boardinghouses the young women shared not only beds, but even pajamas, and they were confined to the premises by fences topped with bamboo spears and barbed wire. Food was scant, sanitation was poor, and disease was widespread...
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