The government directly developed and controlled certain services, such as the railways, the telegraph system, and other public utilities, which usually proved extremely profitable from the very outset. It opened the first railway between Tokyo and its port at Yokohama in 1872. Although many other lines were built by private enterprise, the main network of railways has been in the hands of the government. The government aided many new enterprises and industries by loans or by various other means. It constructed paper-mills and cotton-spinning plants, assisted in the development of a modern merchant marine and shipbuilding industry, helped build up the silk industry, and gave aid and direction to many other essentially private enterprises.
Government financial aid and patronage for the few private capitalists of the early Meiji period contributed to a phenomenal growth of certain financial and commercial interests. Relatively small fortunes skyrocketed into great economic empires, which branched out in all directions, forming mazes of interlocking cartels and companies, all controlled by a single parent company or by a small group of financiers. The Mitsui, which in late Tokugawa times had become a wealthy merchant family, created the largest of these economic empires. Next to the Mitsui came the Mitsubishi interests, developed by a samurai family, the Iwasaki, from a merchant firm of the Edo period.
Government interest and aid in the expansion of commerce and industry also resulted in greater governmental control of the economic life of Japan than was to be found in most other lands in the nineteenth cen-