How did the Japanese worldviews allow them to adapt to rapid industrialization?

Question:

I need 3 reasons.

Answer:

- Japan has always been very work-oriented nation. Working is something honourable, the company is your master and you do your best.

- Japanese have very high level group identity, therefore after the shock of the WWII the people felt that they were working towards a common goal. This and the first point gave a situation where people set aside their personal needs and could easily concentrate on building up the nation. Something very similar happened in Finland where the reparation fees to Soviet Union were payed off a lot faster than needed and they just continued in the same fashion to become one of the richest countries in Europe. Before the WWII (and while fighting with Russia and Germany for their independence) they were one of the poorest countries in Europe. For example Estonia, the Baltic countries, Portugal, Greece and most of Europe was more developed than Finland and all that was changed during 20-25 years of common struggle.

- Japanese are also very open to foreign ideas and technologies. Just as they accepted buddhism 1400 years ago which opened the door to Chinese thoughts and technologies, they had no trouble in the 19th century while being technically a closed society to be open for Western technologies which let them adopt technologies such as railways, steamers etc. After the WWII they simply re-oriented to electronics and instead of adopting technologies they became a flagship in automobiles, computers and especially robotics.

My answers deals with two periods - pre-war industrialisation and technically post-industrialisation which occurred after the Wars, but I think that if we are approaching this problem in a goal-oriented manner (meaning if we want to understand how come a country with rather average population became the 2. economic power in the world by the end of the 20th century) we should look at those two periods of development as inseparably connected.

Now if your task really consideres only the 19th century industrialisation then the answers are
- closed openness. Open for ideas and thought, closed for know-it-all's and gold-diggers and whatnot.
- need to modernise the army - this always has given a lot for the civil sectors as well. (now that doesn't deal with their world view, but you can easily elaborate to why did they need to develop the army. Warning, don't go to the slippery slope of Japanese being aggressive and love to get killed in battles. Here in the West we can't understand that part of their mind easily enough to simply mention it with few phrases. Rather keep it goal orientated. If you investigate the 19th century situation in Japan you'll notice that from the North Russia was already eating up their lands having had annexed Sakhalin), to the West they had enormous China to which Japan has always felt inferior and from East the Black Ships of admiral Perry had appeared. After hundreds of years of feeling that they are a strange peripheral province of China (Zhongguo "the middle kingdom/the centre of the universe") think of Japan's name "Land of the Rising Sun" - it's not romantic, it means "really forking far away". And not only they feel themselves inferior to everyone, but also this everyone is approaching them, who knows what they will do next!?

So if it's a task at school, ignore the Japanese bushido/kamikaze path - you'll get extra cudos for that. If someone asks a question in that direction, tell them it's something far more complicated and yes, it did play a role but is too difficult to place it on the big picture as first we would have to understand it - do you feel like reading 8th century buddhist texts? Me neither. So let's forget it for the moment. If it really interests you, find an university with very academic approach to Japanese culture and only then we can start discussing their seeming eagerness to self-sacrification.