Not many people seem to realize that public safety in Japan became absolute hell around the time of the Boshin War at the end of the Edo period. When a centuries-old authority like the Tokugawa shogunate begins to waver, tilt, and finally collapse, it's obvious when you think about it that things would descend into chaos. In the manga Rurouni Kenshin, there's a backstory where the protagonist is attacked by bandits as a child and everyone else is brutally murdered. That kind of violence wasn't just manga exaggeration; public order really was that broken during that era. Even Tadamasa Oguri, who was stripped of his shogunate position, naturally ended up being targeted and attacked by mobs.
What quietly terrifies me about history is the working conditions in Japan from the early to mid-Showa period. It was relatively recent, yet people were forced to work without a single day off and would regularly drop dead from malnutrition. If I had been born at the bottom of the social ladder in that era, I'm pretty sure I would've become a communist and turned to terrorism.
The collective employment generation was completely abandoned and left behind too, which is another low-key terrifying thing.
I think up until the pre-war era in Japan, human life—especially children's lives—was treated as having practically zero value. Though the Industrial Revolution era in Britain had an appallingly low regard for human rights as well.
It’s truly awful how Britain was still giving morphine to toddlers back in the 1860s.
If you look into cases like the Kotobuki Maternity Home incident, it really shocks you how cheap children's lives were back then. (Kotobuki Maternity Home Incident: In January 1948, amidst the chaos of the post-war period, a mass murder of infants was uncovered at the "Kotobuki Maternity Home" in Shinjuku, Tokyo. The mastermind was a practicing midwife, and it came to light that she had made a fortune by embezzling child-rearing fees and hoarding rationed goods, which shocked society. As similar incidents were uncovered one after another, calls for birth control grew louder, leading to the enactment of the Eugenics Protection Law.)
Right after the war, they would even load war orphans onto trucks, take them out to the mountains, and abandon them...
Human rights and the Industrial Revolution sort of go hand in hand, so I suppose it couldn't be helped.
Red-light districts weren't even abolished until the 1950s. We were living in an era that essentially had a slave system.
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