ABSTRACT
This chapter comprises a discussion of the development of Japanese capitalism. Confucianism has been the ultimate and ever-present source of Japan's groupism. In the literature pertaining to the economic history of late Tokugawa and early Meiji Japan, there is general agreement that capitalist production relations existed and were of some significance within the economy. In England feudal law was made and was able to find room for capitalist private property. The extremely rapid construction of a very potent capitalist economy is what is best known today about the early Meiji era. Small capitalist production grew at the expense of simple commodity production in both sectors, and rentier capitalism also grew at its expense in agriculture. The concept of hegemony enables one to understand how it is that, sometimes, the discourses of rulers may coexist with but at the same time still dominate other and opposed ones.
