ABSTRACT
The Tokugawa period was a period of exceptional stability. It is well-known that Japan kept itself in large degree protected from foreign influences. Interdependently arose a modern banking system of joint-stock banks, modern communications and transport, and an education system, founded on the pre-existing Tokugawa structure, to serve the industrial system. The early industrialisation that took place in Japan during the Meiji period is remarkable in two respects: the programme of modernisation was government-led, and there was no bourgeois class already at hand to implement the programme. Before the modern industrial system was fully formed it was an invaluable transitional institution, reaching its peak around 1900, functioning equally effectively in peasant recruitment, work crews, labour organisations and business associations. Government had largely stepped out of direct industrial entrepreneurship by 1900, but its closeness to industrial development remained. In the period from 1880 up to the beginning of World War I a new approach to employment practice emerged among the employers.
