emperor was the most glorious fate of man, and to believe in the unique virtues of a vaguely defined “national structure” and an even more vague “Japanese spirit.” Together the government and army succeeded in a few decades in creating in the average Japanese the fanatical nationalism already characteristic of the upper classes, and an even more fanatical devotion to the emperor, which had been cultivated by historians and Shinto propagandists and fostered by oligarchs around the throne. They even succeeded in convincing these descendants of peasants, who for almost three centuries had been denied the right to possess swords, that they were not a downtrodden class but members of a warrior race. Japanese political and military indoctrination was indeed thorough and spectacularly successful.
In economic life, the merchant class of late Tokugawa days naturally played an important role in developing private industrial and commercial firms. In these they were joined by the old Daimyo, whose lump sum payments had made them capitalists, and also by many samurai who had chosen business as their new means of livelihood. Japan as a whole, however, was lacking in sufficient private capital to develop adequately all the new industrial and commercial fields demanding exploitation. For this reason and probably because the government was not content with the slower and more haphazard course of private economic development, the Tokyo administration led the way in building up many of the industries and economic organs of Japan, particularly those considered essential for a strong military power.
