Differences in the Japanese and Indian Economy in the Industrial Era

Daniel Matos Period 2 October 29, 2013

DBQ Essay

After reading and reviewing all of the documents presented, it is clear that there is a glaring difference on how India and Japan handle the mechanization of their cotton industry. To start, it is obvious that India has taken advantage looms that process cotton. By the second decade that India started using the machines to process cotton yarn, the number of pounds produced by machines was more than double than the hand-woven yarn. However hand-woven cotton cloth in India was produced in that method more than machines. But by the fourth decade the number of pounds of cotton cloth produced by machines was catching up rapidly to the number of pounds produced by hand-woven cotton cloth. Additionally document 10 heavily emphasizes that India has transitioned to using machines to produce cotton based products. As for Japan, they made more hand-woven cotton products significantly more than machine made cotton products. This is heavily implied by document, where it shows Japanese women weaving the cotton and you see absolutely no machines.

The reason for people in Japan and India to join mills to produce cotton based products was because of the fact that working in a mill gives you more money than working at a farm. This is implied in both documents 4 and 9. The Buddhist priest stated, "The money that a factory girl earned was often more than a farmer's income for the entire year. Although there is a difference of the gender of workers in Japan, in Japan most of the workers in mills are female. Whereas in India, they are mostly male. The most probable reason why females worked in mills in Japan is because of their culture and Buddhism. Since females in Japan were now a clear source of income, they became an integral part of the family. This is evidenced in document 4 as the Buddhist priest states, "For these rural families, the girls were an invaluable source of income...The peasants' only salvation was girls who went to work in the factories." The approach to the mechanization of the cotton industry was clearly different between India and China.