Abstract
The history of the Meiji period often seems to have been written with slogans such as “civilization and enlightenment,” “prosperous country, strong army,” or “good wife, wise mother,” as if the vast and complex political and social changes that occurred between 1868 and 1912 could be tamed by imprisonment in precise phrases.1 Perhaps supreme in the hierarchy of slogans is “rapid modernization.” Few would question that Japan was able to industrialize, modernize, Westernize, and metastasize in an almost miraculously short period of time; yet, the very truth of this statement somehow demeans the struggle. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the sheet (or flat) glass industry, where the road to success was paved with huge capital losses by both the Meiji government and private entrepreneurs.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
Susan B. Hanley, Everyday Things in Premodern Japan (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997).
Tanizaki Jun’ichirō, In Praise of Shadows, trans. Thomas J. Harper and Edward G. Seidensticker (Stony Creek, Ct: Leete’s Island Books, 1977), p. 18.
Donald Keene, trans., Essays in Idleness— the Tsurezuragusa of Kenkō (New York: Columbia University Press, 1967), p. 50.
Yoshinobu Ashihara, The Hidden Order—Tokyo through the Twentieth Century, trans. Lynne E. Riggs (Tokyo and New York: Kodansha International, 1986), p. 13.
James Jackson Jarves, A Glimpse at the Art of Japan (Philadelphia: Albert Saifer, 1970), p. 115.
Christopher Dresser, Traditional Arts and Crafts of Japan (New York: Dover, 1994), p. 247. For example, British Consul Rutherford Alcock also expresses this theory in Capital of the Tycoon (1863) and Arts and Industries of Japan (1878).
F.G. Notehelfer, American Samurai: Captain L.L. Janes and Japan (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1985), p. 169. In 1870, Janes was invited to Kumamoto to run a school.
Sakita Yōsuke, Nihon garasu kagami hyakunenshi (Osaka: Nihon Garasu Kagami Kōgyō, 1971), pp. 2–3.
Dorothy Blair, A History of Glass in Japan (Tokyo: Kodansha International, 1973), pp. 178–179.
Arthur E. Fowle, Flat Glass (Toledo, Ohio: The Libbey-Owns Sheet Glass Co., 1924), pp. 17, 31–32.
Sidney Devere Brown and Akiko Hirota, eds., The Diary of Kido Takayoshi (Tokyo: University of Tokyo Press, 1985), Vol. 2, p. 289.
See Kume Kunitake, Bei-Ō kairan jikki, 5 v. (Tokyo: Iwanami bunko, 1978), Vol. 2, pp. 156–159 (St. Helens in Manchester), p. 336 (Chances), p. 342 (Osier’s in Birmingham); Vol. 3, pp. 192–195, 201–206 (Belgium); Vol. 4, p. 355 (Venice), trans. in English as Iwakura Embassy 1871–1873: A True Account of the Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary’s Journey of Observation through the United States of American and Europe 5 v. (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2002), Vol. 2, pp. 154–161 (Manchester), pp. 372–375 (Birmingham), Vol. 3, pp. 194–199 (Belgium), Vol. 4, pp. 355–358 (Venice).
Yetaro Kinoshita, The Past and Present of Japanese Commerce (New York: Columbia University Press, 1902), pp. 93–94.
Sakita, Nihon garasu kagami hyakunenshi, p. 20. According to Sakita, the first imports were made by an Englishman. These two firms are listed in Yokohama kaikō shiryōukan, ed., Zusetsu Yokohama gaikokujin iryūchi (Yurindō, 1998), pp. 68, 73.
Kozo Yamamura, “General Trading Companies in Japan: Their Origins and Growth,” in Japanese Industrialization and its Social Consequences, ed. Hugh Patrick (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976), p. 169.
Supposedly they are descended from the aristocratic Fujiwara family. See Oland D. Russell, The House of Mitsui (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1939), pp. 24–61.
Tsuda Mamichi, “On the Trade Balance,” in Meiroku Zassh: Journal of the Japanese Enlightenment, ed. William R. Braisted (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1976), p. 326.
William Eleroy Curtis, The Yankees of the East (New York: Stone & Kimball, 1896), Vol. 1, p. 149. The value was US$183,883.
Dai Nihon Yōgyō Kyōkai, ed., Nihon kinsei yōgyōshi (Tokyo, privately printed, 1916), Vol. 4, pp. 96–97.
Inoue Akiko, “The Early Development of the Glass Industry of Japan,” in The Development of the Japanese Glass Industry, ed. Erich Pauer and Sakata Hironobu (Marburg: Marburger Japan-Reihe, 1995), p. 14.
Sources are conflicting as to whether sheet glass was ever produced there at all. Some, such as Tsuchiya Yoshio, attribute the first glass to Iwaki Tatsujirō, Nihon no garasu (Tokyo: Shikōsha, 1987), p. 192.
Sone Tatsuzō, “Nihon shorai no jutaku ni tsuite,” in Nihon kindai shisō taikei toshi/kenchiku (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 1990), p. 337. Condor is famous as the designer of the Rokumeikan, His best-known building that still stands is probably the National Museum at Ueno.
Tsuchiya Yoshio, Nihon no garasu (Shikōsha, 1987), p. 190.
J. Morris, Advance Japan: A Nation Thoroughly in Earnest (London: W.H. Allen & Co., 1895), p. 386. Morris was employed by the Department of Public Works in Tokyo.
Okuma Shigenobu, ed., Fifty Tears of New Japan (London: Smith, Elder & Co., 1909), p. 600. The figures are for 1900.
Tokutomi Kenjiro, Footprints in the Snow, trans. Kenneth Strong (New York: Pegasus, 1970), p. 110. Japanese title Omoide no ki. While this is a novel, it is semiautobiographical and the impressions can be regarded as honest.
Douglas Sladen, The Japs at Home (London: Hutchinson & Co., 1892), p. 17.
Nakamura keisuke, Bunmei kaika to Meiji no sumai (Tokyo: Rikōgakusha, 2000), p. 170;
Edward Seidensticker, Low City, High City (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1983), p. 111.
Kondō Yutaka, Meiji shokki no gi yōfū kenchiku no kenkyū (Tokyo: Rikōgakusha, 1999), p. 223.
Ibid., p. 88 and Donald Keene, Emperor of Japan (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), p. 420.
Alice Mabel Bacon, A Japanese Interior (New York: Houghton Mifflin and Company, 1893), p. 38.
See also, e.g., Arthur Collins Maclay, A Budget of Letters from Japan, second edition (New York: A.C. Armstrong & Son, 1886), p. 154.
Shibusawa Keizō, ed., Japanese Life and Culture in the Meiji Era, trans. Charles S. Terry (Tokyo: Ōbunsha, 1958), p. 129.
Edward S. Morse, Japanese Homes and Their Surroundings (New York: Dover Publications, 1961), p. 132.
Inoue Akiko, Garasu no hanashi (Tokyo: Gihōdō, 1988), p. 50.
Augusta M. Campbell Davidson, Present Day Japan (Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott Company, 1904), p. 6.
Translations from, Natsume Sōseki, And Then, trans. Norma Moore Field (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1978), p. 72. References to the glass doors appear throughout the book.
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Copyright information
© 2005 Martha Chaiklin
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Chaiklin, M. (2005). A Miracle of Industry: The Struggle to Produce Sheet Glass in Modernizing Japan. In: Low, M. (eds) Building a Modern Japan. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781403981110_8
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781403981110_8
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, New York
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-53057-1
Online ISBN: 978-1-4039-8111-0
eBook Packages: Palgrave History CollectionHistory (R0)