Sites of Japan’s Meiji Industrial Revolution: Iron and Steel, Shipbuilding and Coal Mining

How does a feudal society industrialize in barely fifty years? Twenty-three sites scattered mainly across south-west Japan answer the question, tracing the drive for iron, ships and coal from the mid-1800s into the early 1900s — from experimental furnaces built by samurai clans to shipyards and the sea-girt Hashima colliery. UNESCO inscribed the Sites of Japan's Meiji Industrial Revolution in 2015, marking the first successful graft of Western industrialization onto a non-Western nation.