MOST AMERICAN TEXTBOOKS do a capable job of summarizing the political and economic facts of Japan's modern history. The country, in their telling, modernized quickly in the late 1800s, turned militant in the 1930s, went to war in the 1940s, reemerged under American guidance in the 1950s, and became an “economic animal” in the 1960s. In the 1990s, the bubble burst. Unfortunately, most of these textbooks ignore the rich and varied lives of the Japanese people themselves: their consumption patterns, their work patterns and entertainment styles, the movements they joined, the way they lived. It is that story that will be outlined here, a story that finds in each of Japan's evolutionary periods tension – sometimes dynamic, sometimes debilitating-between bright forces such as freedom, affluence, equality, and progress and the often darker forces of control, poverty, and class division.

1895 – 1910: A Mass Society Emerges

The years 1895 to 1904, bridging the Sino-and Russo-Japanese wars, turned Japan into a mass-oriented, urban nation. Social change had been occurring continuously since the 1868 Meiji Restoration, but the semi-feudal legacy of earlier centuries prevented modernity from reaching large masses until the 1890s, when Japan's cities began to look much like their counterparts in Europe and America.

It was jobs that brought people into Japan's cities in these years, expanding Tokyo's factory population by 4,000 annually and pushing its population past 2 million by 1905.

And it was jobs that made the cities modern; for with the employees came expanding schools, rising literacy, sprawling slums, demands for services – and the rise of mass institutions. Newspapers, for example, evolved from small opinion journals into huge organs with 200,000 subscribers, edited by profit-driven men like Kuroiwa Shūroku who was accused of using sensationalism to attract the coarser classes – of acting like a “bartender who pours alcohol into his customers’ glasses to trap them.”

A similar entrepreneurial drive caused Japan's turn-of-the-century cities to bustle with new products and inventions. Movies were introduced to Japan in 1898. The country's first beer hall opened in 1898. In 1900, modern waterworks began operating in central Tokyo.