Apart from Japan, these are all Western countries. In the West, the first country to adopt capitalism was Britain, while Japan was the first to do so in the non-Western world. Japan has come to be viewed as the only country to succeed in catching up with the capitalist nations led by Britain. However, this is an oversimplification.
It is certainly true that, from the Meiji era onwards, the Japanese tried to catch up with Britain, and scholars have applied theories of economic development in the West, particularly Britain, to the Japanese case. Objectively speaking, however, there is a fundamental difference between the development of Britain and that of Japan. The most basic difference lies in the question of who were the leaders of this economic development: while the leaders in Britain were capitalists, those in Japan were managers or entrepreneurs in the true sense of these words.
As Tohata Seiichi points out in The Makers of Japanese Capitalism (publised by Iwanamishoten, 1964, in Japanese), _As far as Japanese capitalism is concerned, the overwhelming majority of those who exhibited the entrepreneurial spirit and became captains of industry were former samurai. The lineage of entrepreneurs of the Meiji era was strongly colored by these men._ Tsuchiya Takao, who should be seen as the originator of the study of the history of business administration in Japan, states in A Study of Japanese Capitalism from the Perspective of Business Administration History (published by Misuzushobo, 1954, in Japanese), _What were the backgrounds of those viewed as the leaders among these Meiji businessmen? The vast majority of them came from the warrior class. These were not all _pure_ samurai; they included those who had been peasants but later became samurai. However, if this group are also categorized as former samurai, then it can be argued that all these entrepreneurs had samurai origins._
So even if, strictly speaking, the entrepreneurs of the Meiji era were not all from the warrior class, they were imbued with the samurai spirit. In this sense they were quite similar to the gentleman capitalists who were the leading figures in British capitalism. Today British scholars characterize their country_s capitalism as _gentleman capitalism._ This phrase was popularized by Cain and Hopkins in their study Gentlemanly Capitalism and British Expansion Overseas (in Economic History Review, 2nd series, 1986), in which the authors made the following comparison with Japan: _The influential men we describe as _gentleman capitalists_ came to occupy a position of preeminence in British society at the end of the seventeenth century. The nucleus of this group were powerful large landowners who, like the samurai, combined the prestige that accompanied their inherited social status with progressive, market-oriented aspirations._ Cain and Hopkins thus argue that, at the end of the seventeenth century, the British gentleman after the Glorious Revolution (1688) and the Japanese samurai of the Genroku era (1688_1704) had a similar social status, progressive market orientation, and were large landowners.
This is a misunderstanding. The samurai certainly had a high social status and exerted themselves fully in administrative duties on behalf of their domain but, unlike British gentlemen, they were not landowners. There are two main theories as to the origins of the samurai: the Imperial Court theory and the landed feudal lord theory. In the Kamakura era (1185_1333) the typical samurai was undoubtedly a landed feudal lord, but by the Genroku era most samurai lived on retainers_ stipends and were no longer landowners. The land was effectively owned by the peasantry, a fact officially recognized by the Land Tax Reform Law of 1873, which approved private ownership rights of peasants who had come to own land. However, instead of the rice they received during the Edo era, samurai in the Meiji era were provided with public bonds. In short, samurai differed from British gentlemen in that they were not landowners. In schematic terms, the status of the British gentleman was founded on the social principle of exclusive private ownership of land, while that of the Japanese samurai was founded on the social principle of the denial of land ownership.
