Naofumi Nakamura

Diversification and Convergence: The Development of Locomotive Technology in Meiji Japan

This chapter offers a reconsideration of the process of Japan’s railway technology development during the Meiji period while focusing on the role of railway engineers and their technical imitation. It is true that underlying Japan’s advancement from imitation to original design were the formation of a cadre of Japanese engineers in both the government railway and private railway companies and the manufacturing know-how cultivated through the copying of a wide variety of model locomotives . In the context of the first wave of globalization occurring around the transition from the 19th to the 20th century, the ability to freely choose from among the most advanced railway materials offered by UK, US, and Germany contributed to the diversification of technology and concomitant accumulation of experience. It was the convergence of this technology and know-how that bore fruit in the development original technology.

Getting on a Train: Railway Passengers and the Growth of Train Travel in Meiji Japan

In early Meiji Japan, the railway was one of the icons of civilisation and progress. The positive image of the railway and rail travel, both as a symbol and as a ‘convenience of civilisation’, was clearly widely held in those days (Ericson, 1996, pp. 53–55). Passengers who used the railways for special and occasional purposes, such as tourism, predominated, because railway travel was expensive at that time (as will be discussed further later), and in the 1870s, when the railways were being established, most passengers belonged to the upper and middle classes. Figure 9.1, which reproduces a print by one of the most well-known ukiyo-e artists of the period, shows the waiting room at Shinbashi Station in Tokyo in 1873, full of apparently richly dressed men and women.