Japan is a country of progress and its economic history is studied in great detail since the 19th century after the Meiji restoration. This country managed to become the first non-European or North American contemporary world power. This change occurred thanks to the relatively late integration of the industrializing measures that were born a century ago.
Economic development, which transformed Japan into an industrial country, is considered a phenomenon that is firmly established until after the Pacific War, but its beginnings go from decades before. Industrialization was born in 1886, a year of great political change, when the so-called Meiji restoration takes place in history and a new government emerges determined to make progressive and modern capitalist decisions oriented towards welfare and national improvement. Later there were recessionary and violent moments that forced Japan to adopt new systems, make relations with other groups of great power, join two World Wars and, finally, recover from the devastation seen in World War II and reach its peak in the period called Japanese Miracle.
In the Meiji era, the leaders inaugurated a new education system based on the West for all young people, sent thousands of students to the United States and Europe and hired more than 3,000 Westerners to teach modern science, mathematics, technology and foreign languages in Japan. The government also built railroads, improved roads, and inaugurated an agrarian reform program to prepare the country for further development.
