Yokohama

Yokohama is named as the endpoint of Japan’s first railway, built between Tokyo and Yokohama after the Meiji Restoration. In the book’s account, the line is a concrete sign of the new government’s break with the old feudal order: the state was not merely reorganizing political authority but investing in transport and industry, changes that helped position Japan to benefit from the Industrial Revolution in Asia.

Infrastructure after the Restoration

Following the Meiji Restoration, Japan undertook a broad program of institutional reform. Feudalism was abolished in 1869; the former fiefs were surrendered to the government and made into prefectures administered by appointed governors. Taxation was centralized, and a modern bureaucratic state replaced the feudal one. The reforms also introduced equality of social classes before the law, removed restrictions on internal migration and trade, abolished the samurai class despite rebellions, and established individual land rights and freedom to pursue trades.

The government also took an active role in building infrastructure. In 1869, it formed a steamship line between Tokyo and Osaka and began the first railway, running from Tokyo to Yokohama. The route’s endpoints place Yokohama within a larger effort to connect cities through state-backed transport rather than leave development to inherited feudal arrangements.

Industrial development and significance

The railway was part of a wider shift toward manufacturing. The account describes the new state’s infrastructure-building alongside the development of industry, including an earlier initiative in Satsuma domain: its lord built factories for pottery, cannon, and cotton yarn, imported English textile machinery, established Japan’s first modern cotton-spinning mill in 1861, and built two modern shipyards.

By 1890, Japan had adopted Asia’s first written constitution and established a constitutional monarchy with an elected parliament, the Diet, and an independent judiciary. The book treats this transformation—including state investment in transport and industry—as decisive in making Japan the primary beneficiary of the Industrial Revolution in Asia. Yokohama’s place at the end of the first railway gives the city a specific role in that account: it marks the reach of a new infrastructure network built amid the country’s institutional and economic change.