Rural Manufacturing and Agricultural Production: Selling the ‘Backward’ Japanese Economy

Abstract

This chapter concerns with the commercial exhibits displayed at the 1910 Japan-British Exhibition. It also focuses in particular on what those commercial exhibits may tell us about the broader economic context that produced them, and the relative positions of the Japanese and British economies at this time. The first section of outlines composition of Japan's trade-related exhibits at the Exhibition. The second half comments on some of the ways in which these primary and traditional areas production represented to the British public and overseas opinion. The most important areas of the Exhibition from an economic perspective were the Palace of Natural Resources, the Industrial Palace and the Textile. Portraying an image of progress and change that built on traditional strengths and existing realities, presided western-style state, part of the Meiji reinvention of tradition, but also established a line of continuity in Japanese history that has persisted through to the present. Keywords:exhibition; industrial palace; Japanese; natural resources; textile