Shimazu Nariakira

Shimazu Nariakira industrialised one Japanese domain by himself, a decade before the country decided to do it. He was heir to Satsuma, at the far south-west of Japan, the second richest domain and the one furthest from the shogun's reach - and had to wait until he was forty-two to inherit it, after a succession dispute with his father's favourite that ended in ordered suicides. What he did with eight years is the point. He built the Shuseikan works at Kagoshima: a reverberatory furnace copied from a Dutch book that nobody in Japan had seen work, a blast furnace, a shipyard, glass and ceramics, and eventually a cotton mill. He built Japan's first western-rigged warship and first steamship, and flew a flag of a red disc on white on them that was later adopted as the national flag. He also had daguerreotypes taken, one of which survives and is the oldest surviving photograph made by a Japanese photographer. His politics were a middle position: open the country deliberately and arm it, rather than expel the barbarians or submit to them, and marry his adopted daughter to the shogun to influence the succession. He promoted men on ability regardless of rank, which is how a low-ranking clerk named Saigo Takamori became his political agent in Edo. He died suddenly in 1858 while assembling troops to march on Kyoto, possibly of cholera and possibly poisoned. Saigo's position collapsed with him, and Satsuma led the Meiji Restoration ten years later with the industry he had built.

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