/jp/ - Otaku Culture

>>16804554
The material standard of living in Japan of that era was brutal, and certainly below that of the contemporary Germany. Starvation, poor farm girls sold to Geisha houses, virtual slave labor for these same poor farm girls who sought work in city textile/silk mills, and on and on.

Meiji/Taisho reforms looked nice on paper, but took a long time to effect the long suffering plight of the Japanese peasantry etc. Mikiso Hane's "Peasants, Rebels, and Outcasts" is a good academic history of the era.

Imamura's "Ballad of Narayama" is a stark portrait of peasant life during the Meiji era and most accurate: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PCSpol_TJ7k

Factories, steel battleships, defeating Russia even, did not mean a modernizing Japan was modern. Agrarian life of that period was, in some ways, a worse existence than North Korea.