The Cost of Modernization

Women working in a crowded factory

The switch from a agricultural to an industrial economy led to misery to Japanese factory workers.
Early Japanese factories were dark and dangerous and the work hours were very long, 12-14 hours a day.
Diseases such as tuberculosis spread within crowded cities.
many workers were women and children who received low wages and were treated like slaves.
The replacement of technology made traditional methods obsolete which upset the older generations of Japanese.

Japanese Men Harvesting Rice (1880)

Very little of the wealth gained by the devotion "Rich Country, Strong Military" trickled down to the farms on which the vast majority of the population still toiled.
While huge battleships were being superbly engineered and constructed, the majority of the population was bent over rice paddies, struggling for food and sometimes surviving by ignoring the new laws prohibiting the sale of daughters into prostitution.