The miracle of Japan’s growth after World War II is well known but that was Japan’s second miracle. The first was perhaps even more surprising. At the end of the 19th century, under the Meiji Restoration, Japan transformed itself almost overnight from a peasant economy to an industrial powerhouse.
After centuries of resisting economic and social change, Japan transitioned from a very poor, mainly agricultural export-oriented economy to a manufacturing-oriented economy. under fifteen years.
In a landmark new paper, Juhász, Sakabe, and Weinstein show that the key to this change was a major effort to translate and integrate technical knowledge into the Japanese language. This government-led program made high-quality industrial knowledge accessible to Japanese businessmen and workers in a way unmatched by non-Western countries at the time.
Here is an amazing graph that speaks volumes about the story. In both 1870 and 1910 most of the technical information in the world was in French, English, Italian and German but look what happened in Japan–no technical literature in 1870 to match English in 1910. no other country does this.
Translating a technical document today is much easier than in the past because the words already exist. Translating technical texts in the late 19th century, however, required the creation and standardization of entirely new terms.
…the Institute of Barbarian Books (Bansho Torishirabesho)…was assigned to create English and Japanese dictionaries to facilitate technical translation. This project was the first step in what would become a major government effort to integrate and absorb Western science. Linguists and lexicographers have written extensively about the difficulty of scientific translation, which explains why little codification of information occurs in languages other than English and its closest cousins: French and German (cf Kokawa et al. 1994; Lippert 2001; Clark 2009). The language problem was twofold. First, no words existed in Japanese for canonical Industrial Revolution products such as railroad, steam engine, or telegraph, and using phonetic representations of all the untranslatable jargon in a technical book resulted in transliteration, not translation. Second, the translation needed to be the same so that all translators could translate a foreign word into the same Japanese.
Solving these two problems was one of the main goals of the Institute.
Here is a graph showing the creation of new names in Japan by year. You can see the explosion of new words in the late 19th century. Note that this happened well after the Perry Mission. The words did not just appear and the authors say they were created as a form of industrial policy).
Incidentally, AstralCodexTen points us to an interesting history of a translator who at that time worked in economic literature:
[Fukuzawa] made great progress in many translations. Among them is the first Western economics book translated into Japanese. In the course of this work, he encounters difficulties with the concept of “competition.” He decides to come up with a new Japanese name, kyoso, derived from words that mean “race and fight.” His patron, a Confucian, is not impressed with this version. He suggests another interpretation. Why not “love of the nation displayed in commerce”? Or “merchant giving in times of national distress”? But Fukuzawa persists kyosoand now the word is the first result in Google Translate.
There is much more to this paper. In particular, to show how translation leads to productivity growth on an industry-by-industry basis and to demonstrate the importance of this method of economic growth worldwide.
The bottom line for me is this: What caused the industrial revolution is a perennial question—was it coal, freedom, literacy?–but this is the first paper that provides what I think is a really powerful answer. Japan’s rapid industrialization under the Meiji restoration was driven by its unprecedented effort to translate, assimilate, and disseminate Western technical knowledge into the Japanese language.
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