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Please read the following: an excerpt from the 2008 Japan entry of the Oxford
Encyclopedia of the Modern World, and a brief look at Japanese economic growth since
1964 from the April 2014 OECD Observer.

On the last page are links to various sources of information on Japan for those interested.

Oxford Encyclopedia of the Modern World, Edited by Peter N. Stearns

Publisher: Oxford University Press
Print Publication Date: 2008. Print ISBN-13:9780195176322
Published online: 2008. Current Online Version: 2008. eISBN:9780195341126
“Japan” entry by David L. Howell

Historical Overview
The modern history of Japan is the history of modernity. From the middle of the
nineteenth century to the middle of the twentieth, Japanese leaders and thinkers were
preoccupied with fashioning a state that could compete with the Western powers. This
impulse reflected their insecurity over Japan's ability to survive in a hostile international
environment. They succeeded, but only at the cost of conflicts whose legacy lingers into
the twenty-first century.
Japan in the Tokugawa Period.
Once dismissed as a feudal dark age, the Tokugawa period (1603–1867) now
shines in the popular imagination as a golden age of peace and prosperity and is
celebrated as the fullest expression of native Japanese culture before the arrival of
Western imperialism changed Japan's place in the world forever. No age is ever
completely dark or completely golden, of course: the ups and downs of the era's
reputation reflect selective emphases on its real contradictions. Formal institutions,
established to support the military needs of the ruling Tokugawa house and its allies,
seemingly left little room to accommodate social mobility, economic development, and
intellectual freedom. If one focuses on how those institutions were supposed to work in
theory, early modern Japan appears to be, as E. Herbert Norman once put it, the world's
first police state. In practice, however, Tokugawa institutions proved remarkably supple,
with the result that Japan enjoyed a measure of social mobility, considerable economic
growth, and a vibrant public sphere (though rarely overtly political).
Tokugawa political institutions were the product of an extended period of civil
war. For centuries before and after the founding of the Tokugawa Shogunate, an emperor
reigned powerlessly and mostly irrelevantly in Kyoto while military men ruled. Toyotomi
Hideyoshi (1537–1598) attained effective hegemony in 1590, ending 150 years of
turmoil, but died before his heir reached adulthood. His rival, Tokugawa Ieyasu (1542–
1616), took advantage of Hideyoshi's death to consolidate power for himself. His rise
culminated in his assumption of the title of shogun, or paramount military leader, in
1603.
The Tokugawa Shogunate was not fully centralized. Ieyasu and his immediate
successors built on a federalist model that Hideyoshi had imposed to maintain balance
among more or less autonomous military houses. The shogunate controlled a quarter of
the country's productive capacity itself, leaving the rest in the hands of about 260 domain
lords, or daimyo, who were allowed to retain their autonomy in exchange for swearing
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fealty to the Tokugawa house. This seemingly precarious system survived for 265 years,
nearly all of them peaceful: from 1637 to 1864 there were no significant military conflicts
in Japan.
The early modern period was thus a time of peace in a country permanently
mobilized for war. Major institutions were informed by the need to maintain the military
preparedness of the Tokugawa house. Perhaps the most important by-product of this
imperative was the social-status system, which categorized social groups according to
their relationship with military authority. These groups fulfilled status-specific duties in
exchange for a measure of autonomy and the promise of benevolent rule. They were
arranged in a hierarchy, with samurai warriors at the top and outcastes at the bottom, but
the system also recognized the essential equality of each status group's function in the
political order. Samurai in the service of the shogun and daimyo accounted for about 6
percent of the national population. Outcastes (mostly leather workers and licensed
beggars) composed perhaps 2 or 3 percent of the population, and Buddhist and Shinto
clerics accounted for a few hundred thousand more people. The remaining 90 percent of
the population were commoners: peasants, fishers, merchants, and artisans.
Tokugawa Japan is sometimes characterized as isolated from the outside world.
Although the shogunate certainly did closely manage contact with the outside, Japan was
by no means a closed country. It maintained diplomatic and commercial relations with
Korea and Ryukyu (the main island of which is Okinawa) and allowed Chinese traders to
call at Nagasaki. The closing of the country was mostly to Europe: in 1639 the shogunate
expelled Spanish and Portuguese traders and missionaries and forbade almost all travel
abroad. As a result, officially sanctioned contact with Europe was limited to the Dutch
trading post at Nagasaki, and even that was constrained by the shogunate's strict
proscription of Christianity. Nonetheless, goods and information flowed into Japan at a
steady trickle, with the result that by the early nineteenth century there were small
communities of experts knowledgeable in Western medicine and science, and educated
Japanese in general were remarkably well informed about world geography despite their
own inability to travel abroad.
Economic growth was a fortuitous by-product of the Tokugawa institutional
structure. As a security measure, the shogunate required daimyo to spend about half their
time in Edo (modern-day Tokyo) in a practice known as alternate attendance. The daimyo
in turn required their own retainers to congregate in castle towns and posted many men
permanently in Edo. As a result, in the early eighteenth century more than 10 percent of
the Tokugawa population lived in cities, including some very large ones, such as Edo,
with 1 million people, and Kyoto and Osaka, with around 400,000 each. The samurai
became an almost exclusively urban class, with few ties to the land and little involvement
in the day-to-day governance of peasant villages. Consequently, peasant village headmen
and other rural elites emerged as the literate agents of an engaged but mostly apolitical
public sphere. Urbanization and attendance at Edo encouraged consumption and the
growth of transport networks and markets, with the result that information and goods
circulated widely and mostly freely throughout the country.
Peace and stability spurred population growth as well, particularly during the first
half of the Tokugawa period, when the population grew from about 18 million in 1600 to
about 30 million in 1720. Thereafter the population remained virtually unchanged. The
stagnation of the population had many causes, but deliberate choices among the
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peasantry—including abortion, infanticide, and delayed marriage—were a major factor.

The economy continued to grow after 1720, albeit at a slower pace than previously, with
the result that Tokugawa Japan was a rare premodern example of intensive economic
growth. The economy grew unevenly: central Honshu enjoyed far greater prosperity than
the northeastern and southwestern peripheries of the country, and famines occasionally
took a devastating toll on the rural population. Still, overall the Tokugawa period was, by
the standards of the preindustrial world, a time of prosperity, stability, and growth.
Japan's Embrace of Modernity.
Nothing about the character of the Tokugawa period foretold Japan's self-
conscious and generally successful embrace of Western-style modernity in the decades
following the Meiji Restoration of 1868. Even the hints of capitalist development to
come, such as the spread of protoindustrial manufacturing in the late eighteenth and early
nineteenth centuries, were embedded in an institutional framework utterly alien to the one
that would succeed it.
Moreover, Japan in the years immediately preceding the restoration hardly
appeared to be a regime on the verge of collapse. To be sure, there were signs of stress.
The increasingly frequent appearance of foreign ships off the coast, many of them
bringing unwanted overtures for trade, stoked anxieties about Western imperialism,
particularly after news from China of the First Opium War (1840–1842) reached Japan.
The shogunate and many domains experienced fiscal crises in the second quarter of the
nineteenth century, and their efforts at retrenchment and reform often did more economic
harm than good. Finally, large parts of the archipelago were decimated by famine in the
1830s. Still, the problems were similar to others the regime had weathered in the past. No
one could have guessed in 1850 that the Tokugawa Shogunate would fall in less than two
decades.
But fall it did, and quickly too, once its legitimacy was undermined when
shogunal leaders proved incapable of coping with the diplomatic and political crises that
followed the Western intrusion. Commodore Matthew Perry's veiled threats of war forced
the shogunate to negotiate a treaty with the United States in 1854. The major European
powers soon secured treaties of their own. In 1859 Yokohama and other treaty ports
opened to the West, and Japan entered the world economy. The opening brought
disruptions—inflation and cholera for starters—but Japan never fell victim to predatory
incursions of the sort that weakened China and so many other non-Western regions.
Nevertheless, Perry's arrival marks a decisive turning point in Japanese history. The
inadequacy of the shogunate's response to the West radicalized young samurai from
large, peripheral domains, who began to look for an alternative model of politics. Mixing
terrorism and power politics, they steadily chipped away at the shogunate's base of
support.
Japan was fortunate that the Tokugawa regime lost legitimacy so quickly and
thoroughly. After 1868 even those dissatisfied with the new Meiji government had no
thought of going back. The contrast with Korea and China is instructive: the Chosǒn and
Qing dynasties survived decades of turmoil before finally succumbing in 1910 and 1911,
respectively, too late for viable alternatives to succeed them, with colonization and
warlordism the result. In Japan, however, the imperial institution was a ready-made
alternate source of legitimacy to the shogunate. Ancient and revered, yet powerless, the
court was an empty vessel ready to be filled as the new rulers chose.
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The Meiji regime, dominated by men from the former Chōshū and Satsuma
domains, undertook policies seeking to persuade the West of Japan's modernity. Only by
doing so could Japan hope to revise the unequal treaties that the shogunate had signed
and thereby restore full sovereignty to Japan. In 1871 a group of top officials, led by the
court noble Iwakura Tomomi (1825–1883), toured the United States and Europe to see
the modern West for themselves. They and others of their ilk resolved to remake all
Japanese institutions on the Western model. By 1900 the treaties had been revised and
Japan was a highly centralized, Prussian-style constitutional monarchy, with a conscript
military, universal education, a capitalist economy, and the beginnings of a colonial
empire. The domains, the samurai, and all the other trappings of the Tokugawa era were
long gone.
Domestically, the first decade of the Meiji period was a quest for “civilization and
enlightenment” (bunmei kaika). Although the phrase is often associated with men like the
educator and journalist Fukuzawa Yukichi (1835–1901), who enthusiastically
championed Western values and institutions, in fact advocates for reform all across the
ideological spectrum rationalized their ideas in terms of enlightenment. Thus, for
example, the campaign to abandon men's topknots in favor of Western haircuts featured
the language of both Western scientific rationality and nativist nostalgia for the supposed
coiffures of antiquity. As a slogan for rallying diverse forces around the banner of
change, “civilization and enlightenment” was a powerful tool.
The Meiji regime did have to contend with dissent. The most serious challenges it faced
came from samurai disgruntled by the dismantling of the Tokugawa status system and its
privileges, such as the right to bear two swords. In 1877 a former leader of the Meiji
government, Saigō Takamori (1827–1877), led a rebellion against the state in his home
domain of Satsuma. The central government's conscript army prevailed after a costly and
bloody series of battles.
Once the Satsuma crisis passed, the regime's control over Japan was secure: later
dissenters fought to reform the system, not overturn it. In the late 1870s the government
faced an increasing clamor for parliamentary democracy. The Popular Rights Movement,
as it is called, gathered well-to-do peasants, journalists, and former samurai in mostly
(but not always) peaceful campaigns of oratory and protest. Over time the state succeeded
in co-opting the movement with a series of strategic concessions, notably the promise of
a constitution, a promise made in 1881 and duly fulfilled in 1889.
Empire and Industry.
Victory in the First Sino-Japanese War of 1894–1895 ushered Japan into the ranks
of East Asian powers. The war was fought over and in Korea, a tributary of the Qing and
the most enduring object of Japanese imperialist longing. Japanese interest in Korea had
several sources. To politicians like the oligarch Yamagata Aritomo (1838–1922), who
saw regional geopolitics as a zero-sum game, gaining influence over Korea was an urgent
matter of national security: he liked to describe the peninsula as “a dagger pointed at the
heart of Japan.” Japanese sojourners in Korea wanted their government's help in
furthering their economic interests in the peninsula. Most critically, veterans of the
Popular Rights Movement intervened in Korean politics, encouraging reformers who
hoped to emulate Japan's successful embrace of Western-style modernity. Their activities
had the effect of nudging a sometimes eager, sometimes reluctant government in Tokyo
into action, even war, in support of their cause.
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The Treaty of Shimonoseki (1895) gave Japan its first overseas colonies. It also
inaugurated a new era in Japan's relations with the Western powers. Russia, with designs
of its own on Manchuria and Korea, led France and Germany in the Triple Intervention
(1895), which forced Japan to retrocede the Liaodong Peninsula to China. Japan kept
Taiwan and the Pescadores (in the Taiwan Strait), but the shock of the Triple Intervention
turned many Japanese into cynical foreign-policy realists. As the journalist Tokutomi
Sohō put it, “Sincerity and justice did not amount to a thing if you were not strong
enough.” Tension with Russia led eventually to the Russo-Japanese War (1904–1905),
yet another war fought over and in Korea. This war led to Japan's annexation of Korea in
1910. The same tensions also led to the Anglo-Japanese Alliance of 1902, which signaled
Japan's acceptance as a bona fide player in the game of empire and later provided the
impetus for Japan to enter World War I with the Allies.
The First Sino-Japanese War and the humiliation of the Triple Intervention
created a reliable outlet for Japanese nationalism. The Popular Rights Movement had
always had significant nationalist undertones, and the prospect of empire, particularly in
Korea, helped to rally many activists around the state. This support for empire building
spread to the working class in the period after the Russo-Japanese War, during the
flowering of what Andrew Gordon has termed the movement for “imperial democracy.”
Workers supported capitalist development and agitated for a political system that was
democratic but also imperial—that is, they supported both a sovereign emperor and
Japan's maintenance of a colonial empire.
Imperial democracy was made possible by the rise of an industrial working class
and a salaried urban bourgeoisie. Japan's first modern factory, the government-operated
Tomioka filature, opened in 1872. Silk and cotton textiles remained Japan's leading
manufacturing industries well into the twentieth century. Textile mills employed girls and
young women almost exclusively, with the result that Japan's first industrial proletariat
was overwhelmingly female. It was only in the twentieth century—with the emergence of
industries like shipbuilding, chemicals, munitions, and steel—that men became a
significant part of the industrial workforce.
The Tomioka filature, sold to the Mitsui conglomerate at a significant loss in
1893, was typical of the pattern of Meiji industrialization. Because private entrepreneurs
were reluctant to invest in risky capital-intensive new ventures, the government built
industrial enterprises and operated them until they were firmly established. At that point,
the state sold the ventures to politically favored commercial interests at fire-sale prices.
The policy was corrupt, but it did serve to jumpstart key industries through direct
government investment.
The steady development of the capitalist economy in the early twentieth century
supported an expanding population of politically engaged subjects. A public sphere of
newspapers and magazines, trade unions and political parties, operated under the constant
threat of government repression, but succeeded nonetheless in broadening the realm of
public discourse. The main architect of the Meiji constitutional order, Itō Hirobumi
(1841–1909), envisioned a parliament that would give the people a voice without
imperiling the authority he and his fellow oligarchs exercised in the name of the emperor.
Japan remained fundamentally undemocratic—the constitution subordinated civil rights
to the needs of the state, and the franchise was limited initially to a small number of
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propertied men (about 1 percent of the population)—yet the Diet (parliament) quickly
turned into a lively arena of politicking.
Owing largely to popular pressure, Japan overcame many of the structural barriers
to democracy and for a time came to resemble other liberal parliamentary regimes,
particularly during the decade or so following Hara Takashi's (1856–1921) appointment
as prime minister in 1918. During this period, known as the age of Taishō Democracy,
the electorate in 1925 expanded to include all adult men, and politics was dominated by
two major parties, the center-right Minseitō and the more conservative Seiyūkai, whose
leaders took turns as premier.
Taishō Democracy was flawed, however. Aside from the structural problems built
into the constitution, which endowed sovereignty in an emperor who was not actually
expected to rule, critics of parliamentary democracy and capitalism on the far right and
left inhibited the maturation of democratic institutions, often through terror. By 1932
assassinations and other assaults on public figures had destabilized politics so much that
national unity cabinets headed by military men or others outside the party system became
the rule. Moreover, even as the franchise was expanded, other measures to limit open
discourse were enacted, most notably the Peace Preservation Law (1925), which made it
a crime to advocate a change to the “national polity” (kokutai), that is, the emperor
system and its supporting edifice of State Shintō. Although the Peace Preservation Law
was aimed mostly at Communists and others on the far left, the spectrum of acceptable
discourse got so narrow by the 1940s that even academic historians had to proclaim
Japan's founding myths to be literally true or risk charges of lèse-majesté.
War and Defeat.
Japan's descent into aggression abroad and repression at home in the 1930s and
1940s had several sources. The Meiji constitution limited the cabinet's power, which
made it difficult to rein in the military in times of crisis. Boom and bust during and
immediately after World War I left Japan in the economic doldrums for much of the
1920s. The Great Depression hit Japan as it did the rest of the world, and although
recovery was relatively quick, it and a series of poor harvests in the northeast caused
great distress to many in the early 1930s. All these difficulties fed suspicion toward free-
market capitalism and the adversarial party politics of the parliamentary system—in
Japan as in much of the industrialized world. By the early 1930s most influential
Japanese politicians, bureaucrats, and intellectuals had come to feel that the world was
moving inexorably toward a system of autarkic regional blocs. To such observers, it
stood to reason that Japan needed to dominate East Asia if it was to survive in a hostile
world.
Whether or not Japan was fascist during this period is a matter of ongoing debate.
On the one hand, politics was undeniably authoritarian, especially after about 1936. A
mixture of self-censorship and brutal repression helped to contain serious dissent. The
imperial institution, already widely revered, was elevated to such new heights that the
emperor was treated as a demigod and the myths of State Shintō were portrayed as literal
truth. Figures on the far right espoused a bellicose nationalism. On the other hand, the
constitutional order proved surprisingly resilient, and all attempts to form a mass party
along Italian or German lines failed. Moreover, Japan lacked the sort of charismatic
leader usually associated with fascist regimes: General Tōjō Hideki (1884–1948), the
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prime minister from October 1941 to July 1944, was no Mussolini or Hitler, and the
emperor was a remote and strictly symbolic presence.
In any case, to those disillusioned with capitalism, corporatism—a society and
economy under the central control and direction of the state—appeared to offer the
country better prospects, particularly as it mobilized for total war in World War II. Many
of the political and economic structures put into place in the corporatist 1930s by officials
such as Kishi Nobusuke (1896–1987) persisted into the postwar period and contributed
importantly to the rapid economic growth of the 1960s. It is no coincidence that the
wartime Ministry of Munitions was reincarnated after defeat as the Ministry of
International Trade and Industry, which guided what Chalmers Johnson has called the
postwar “developmental state.”
Japan's Greater East Asia War—also known as the Second Sino-Japanese War
and World War II—began in 1931 when Japanese forces in Manchuria provoked sporadic
fighting in northeast China. The Japanese established the puppet state of Manchukuo in
1932, thereby laying the groundwork for Japanese autarky in East Asia. Conflict with
China continued, with full-scale war breaking out in July 1937. The government of
Prince Konoe Fumimaro (1891–1945) missed opportunities to end the conflict and
instead found itself in a hopeless quagmire. Atrocities such as the Nanjing Massacre
(December 1937) continue to haunt Sino-Japanese relations even at the beginning of the
twenty-first century.
Thus, by the time that Japan attacked Pearl Harbor in 1941, it had already been at
war for a decade. Dreams of autarky soured into paranoia over maintaining an expanding
empire starved of resources. Attacking the United States and Britain in an attempt to
secure Southeast Asian oil seemed to be Japan's only hope. Military leaders, knowing that
Japan had no chance of victory in a protracted conflict, hoped that a few quick victories
would persuade the Americans to sue for peace. Other observers expected Japanese
spiritual power to prevail over a materially strong but decadent West. By the time of
Japan's defeat in the Battle of Midway in June 1942, it was evident that a quick victory
was not to be had. As conditions deteriorated, hardliners quashed all talk of surrender for
fear of the consequences to the imperial institution. Only the devastation of two atomic
bombs—in Hiroshima on 6 August 1945 and in Nagasaki on 9 August 1945—and the
entry of the Soviet Union into the war against Japan on 8 August finally persuaded the
leadership to face surrender.
The United States led an occupation of Japan from 1945 to 1952 (Okinawa
remained under American administration until 1972). The occupation is credited with
expunging most institutional manifestations of Japanese militarism other than the
powerful central bureaucracy. Its centerpiece was the promulgation of a new, democratic
constitution in 1947, which stripped the emperor of his sovereignty but kept the imperial
institution as a symbol of the Japanese state and the people. Scholars acknowledge the
transformative impact of the occupation-era reforms, but they also increasingly view the
transwar period—from mobilization in the early 1930s to the postwar recovery in the
1950s—as a single unit. Although postwar Japan is a far more robust democracy than it
ever was before 1945, the structures of the developmental state have remained
fundamentally intact.
Postwar Japan has been a stable and staunch ally of the United States. For nearly
the entire period since 1955, the country has been governed by the conservative Liberal
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Democratic Party, which has mostly delivered on its promises of economic growth and
social stability. The only genuine crisis in the relationship occurred in 1960, when the
government of Prime Minister Kishi Nobusuke rammed through the Diet the renewal of
the U.S.-Japan Security Treaty. This debacle forced Kishi's resignation and prompted his
successor, Ikeda Hayato (1899–1965), to focus on promoting rapid economic growth.
Incomes more than doubled in the 1960s—a fact that led many to tout the Japanese
“economic miracle.” However, the economy has looked much less miraculous since the
early 1990s, when a long speculative bubble, fed largely by an overheated real estate
market, finally burst and Japan went on to experience more than a decade of stagnation.
Women and Gender
During the Tokugawa period, the lower a woman's status, the more freedom she
was likely to enjoy in determining the general course and everyday routines of her life.
Although popular Confucian literature called on women to submit themselves wholly to
their husbands and parents-in-law and frowned on their working outside the home, few
outside the ranks of the samurai and the wealthy commoners who emulated them could
afford to live up to such an ideal. However ironic it seems today, the situation in Japan
was typical of many preindustrial societies, for women at the bottom of the social and
economic ladder were indispensable to the economic lives of their households in ways
that high-status women often were not. Moreover, the household as a self-sustaining
corporate unit did not have the same hold over people at the bottom of society that it did
over those with money and social standing at stake, such as well-to-do merchants, elite
peasants, and samurai of all ranks.
After the Meiji Restoration, the Japanese state emulated Western legal institutions
and, to some extent, notions of family and gender. The civil code of 1898
institutionalized the patriarchal samurai household as the legal norm for the entire
population. This had the effect of reducing women to powerless dependents vis-à-vis
invariably male household heads. Divorce rates, which had been very high in Tokugawa
peasant villages, dropped precipitously. The legal subjugation of women occurred along
with the spread of the bourgeois notion of a women's sphere within the household and the
ideal of the “good wife and wise mother.”
The embrace of Western-style modernity transformed ideas about sexuality as
well. Before the Meiji period, the Japanese did not demarcate sexual relations as
heterosexual and homosexual. Same-sex relations between men were socially acceptable
under some clearly defined circumstances. The same was not true of relations between
women, but women's sexuality was acknowledged and even celebrated. By the end of the
nineteenth century, however, sex had been medicalized, and same-sex relations cordoned
off as deviant.
A modest women's rights movement emerged in the 1910s and 1920s. It was
represented most visibly by the writer Hiratsuka Raichō (1886–1971) and her
Bluestocking, a journal for educated urban women. In the late 1920s the first “modern
girls,” wearing dresses and bobbed hair, brought new notions of modern femininity to
Japan's cities. However, the activities of feminists and fashion plates alike had little
connection with the workaday worlds of peasants and the urban poor. For most women,
significant change in their status did not occur until after World War II, when the 1947
constitution finally gave them the right to vote and the restrictive features of the Meiji
civil code were abolished.
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In Japan at the beginning of the twenty-first century, though an increasing number

of professional women remain in the workforce after marriage and childbirth, becoming a
full-time mother and homemaker nonetheless remains a socially validated and attractive
goal for many women. The biggest family issue of this period is the looming social crisis
wrought by the aging of Japanese society and the steep decline in the birthrate to below
the natural replacement level.

An impressive comeback
©OECD Observer No 298, Q1 2014, Page 56

Click to enlarge
While today Japan is one of the world’s largest and most advanced economies, a member of the G7 and the
most developed country in Asia, in 1964 the picture was quite different.
That was the year Japan became a member of the OECD. It was also the year of the Tokyo Olympics and
the inauguration of the bullet train. At the time, the country’s GDP per capita was down around US$8,000
in 2005 prices, considerably less than half that of the US.
In the 19th century, Japan was one of the world’s largest economies, but the Second World War weakened
the country’s productive capacity. Major investments in human and physical capital in the 1950s and 1960s
would spark a comeback.
In fact, despite suffering the 1973 oil crisis, GDP per capita had increased to some $15,000 a decade after
joining the OECD. The 1980s then marked a shift in Japan’s economy away from manufactured goods and
agriculture towards a highly knowledge-based economy that made it a world leader in high technology. By
1990 GDP per capita was climbing towards $27,000, nearly three-quarters that of the US. But large stock
and property market bubbles eventually formed, and Japan has virtually stagnated since the 1990s.
Nevertheless, the country remains the OECD’s second largest country and the world’s third largest
economy. Its GDP/ capita in 2012 was some $31,400, in constant 2005 dollars. That’s an impressive leap
since 1964, and a good reason to celebrate Japan’s first 50 years at the OECD.
See www.oecd.org/japan/ and stats.oecd.org/Index.aspx?datasetcode=SNA_TABLE1
©OECD Observer No 298, Q1 2014 - See more at:
http://www.oecdobserver.org/news/fullstory.php/aid/4318/An_impressive_comeback.html#sthash.G9nB67
9E.dpuf
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For those interested, here are other good sources of information on contemporary Japan:

The Statistics Bureau of Japan:

http://www.stat.go.jp/english/

The CIA World Factbook provides a current survey and maps:

https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/ja.html

Although the recent edition dates from 1992, the Federal Research Division, Library of
Congress’ Japan: a country study, edited by Ronald E. Dolan and Robert L. Worden is
free and has an extensive historical survey.
Library of Congress Call Number DS806 .J223 1992
http://memory.loc.gov/frd/cs/jptoc.html

Many Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) publications

on Japan are freely available:
http://www.oecd.org/japan/

http://www.oecd.org/eco/surveys/economic-survey-japan.htm

The OECD Better Life Index provides measures in several categories:

http://www.oecdbetterlifeindex.org/countries/japan/

The OECD Education at a Glance on Japan is an overview of education in Japan in

comparison with other OECD countries:
http://www.oecd.org/edu/Japan_EAG2013%20Country%20Note.pdf

The Japanese Foreign Ministry collects many publications at its Japan Foreign Policy
Forum:
http://www.japanpolicyforum.jp/en/

The United Nations, Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Population Division
http://esa.un.org/unpd/wpp/Documentation/publications.htm

Life in Edo (before it was renamed Tokyo):

http://www.library.metro.tokyo.jp/Portals/0/edo/tokyo_library/english/index.html

The Tokyo metropolitan government’s site:

http://www.metro.tokyo.jp/ENGLISH/index.htm