Why Did Japan Become a Developed Country? A Zhihu Debate

A recent answer on the Chinese Q&A platform Zhihu about Japan’s modern rise has drawn attention. The question itself is familiar: Japan absorbed Chinese culture for centuries, so why did it become a developed country in the past hundred-odd years? The respondent, posting as PLIGHT, explains the outcome through geography, resource endowment and overseas expansion. The account contrasts with the usual “hard work” and “institutions” theories and pushes the discussion into more sensitive historical territory.

An island on the periphery

The answer begins by arguing that Japan lacked the natural conditions to become a developed country on its own. In population, minerals and location, Japan long sat on the edge of the East Asian system; even in the maritime era, its position resembled that of the Philippine archipelago and Taiwan. Among the island states on the continental rim, the author notes, only Britain truly rose, but the English Channel is far narrower than the distance from Japan to China, and Britain’s exchanges and feuds with continental Europe ran much deeper. Before the modern era, in other words, Japan had no foundation for regional leadership.

A fast turn to the West

So why did Japan suddenly accelerate in the second half of the 19th century? The answer dates the starting point to the arrival of Commodore Perry’s black ships in 1853, but stresses that the thinkers and doers around the Meiji Restoration — Sakamoto Ryoma and Fukuzawa Yukichi among them — were not markedly superior to the self-strengthening and reform factions of Qing China in the same period. China, too, began its Self-Strengthening Movement after the 1840 Opium War and later launched the late-Qing reforms; its emperors were not unwilling to reform, and China was even Asia’s first republic. The difference lay in scale and intellectual baggage: China was too large and the Confucian tradition weighed heavily, while Japan was a small ship that could turn quickly. The author argues that Japan was never deeply shaped by Confucianism and that its underlying values differed from China’s.

After Perry forced open its ports, Japan swiftly signed treaties with the West and pivoted wholesale to learning from it. This “swapping out the operating system” produced relatively faster progress than China managed in the five or six decades before the fall of the Qing. The author cautions that the shift stemmed not from some unique national wisdom but from a small state’s survival strategy under pressure.

Plunder and war as the starting point

The answer’s core claim is that Japan’s modern development, like that of the Western powers, rested on plunder rather than sheer intelligence, diligence or an enlightened emperor. The targets naturally included China and neighboring countries. In the 1895 First Sino-Japanese War, Japan gambled on its national fortunes and won, extracting 200 million taels of silver from the Qing, or about 240 million taels including interest. After defeating Russia in 1905, its confidence swelled further and it claimed the mantle of leadership for Asia’s yellow races. The author treats these moments as the key external conditions that let Japan complete its primitive accumulation.

The debate

Commenters split over the explanation. Some readers endorsed its framework of geography and external plunder, saying it punctures the romanticized “Japanese miracle” narrative. Others questioned the clean break from Confucian influence, noting that Neo-Confucian learning shaped Japan’s shogunate system deeply in the Edo period and that modern corporate ethics and mass education cannot be explained by a system swap alone. The precise destination and use of the 1895 indemnity also remain debated among scholars, and its actual contribution to Japanese industrialization needs closer accounting.

Whatever the stance, the discussion serves as a reminder that a country’s modern transformation resists single-factor explanations. Geography, institutions, external opportunity and violent plunder intertwine, and culture’s influence is far from a yes-or-no matter. Japan’s experience is neither a replicable template nor something to be dismissed with a word about national character.