In the latter half of the twentieth century, several social scientists engaged in the debate on Japanese miraculous growth. Some of them, for example, Chalmers Johnson, argued that the miracle was a result of a development state that was guided by competent bureaucratic officers. This essay aims to investigate the formation of a modern state in Japan during the end of Tokugawa bakufu to the outset of the Second World War. The investigation based on Andrew Gordon’s “A Modern History of Japan” (2002). During the unification under the Tokugawa shogunate, the bakufu government, which had a base in Edo, had mainly focused on keeping social order and domestic peace. The Tokugawa government got inheritances from the predecessor warlords namely, Oda Nobunaga and Toyotomi Hideyoshi. The inheritances were the establishment of autonomous village organisation, which the state could collect land taxes, centralisation of tax collection, separation of military lords from their fiefs as well as the disarmament of villagers (p. 12-3). Additionally, the Edo bakufu avoided external…show more content… While Chinese empire perceived a rural as a source of order and rebellion, Japanese imperial state should recognise the rural area as a source of wealth. The Japanese state’s revenues crucially relied on the extraction of land tax, which was facilitated by the property rights system, and the foreign exchanges were primarily generated by tea and silk exporting that rooted in economic activities in the rural areas (p.94). Consequently, the state successfully supported industrial development by building heavy-manufacturing factories, which eventually sold to private corporations at relatively low price, and construction railway networks, which lowered the transportation