Japan in 1900 had approximately the same GDP per capita as Mexico and Portugal, but we have strong accounts that it was significantly more modernised. Modernisation was a goal taken very seriously by the government, which at the time was led by a faction of modernising samurai like Ito Hirobumi and Saionji Kinmochi, almost all of whom were educated in the UK, France, or Prussia. Consequently, modernisation quickly became something like a state religion, so public and private investment into each of these was unprecedented almost anywhere in the world.

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Railroads in particular are extremely well-attested, because 80% of them were privately owned and operated, they became highly efficient. From Hobsbawm (1987), by 1900, Japan had more railroad length than any country in the world except the USA and Russia, which are gigantic continental landmasses, while Japan is a relatively small island. We know how efficient these railroads were because the bulk of them were also listed on the Tokyo Stock Exchange, which incidentally was known to be a popular pasttime for rural peasants, akin to socially-acceptable gambling. BoJ Chairman Inoue Junnosuke recalled, "Even in rural whistlestops, people bought and sold shares by daily telephone calls to Tokyo."

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Electricity in Japan behaved essentially the same way. It was first introduced to the country in 1878, and by 1886 the government had launched a massive slate of investment subsidies and incentives to encourage private utilities companies. By 1905, there were almost 700 different power generation companies, which merged into 5 gigantic ones in the Taisho era around 1912. Even in 1905, the largest of them, Tokyo Electric Light, had moved beyond Japan and had subsidiaries operating across Asia, especially in Shanghai, Singapore and of course elsewhere in the Japanese colonial empire. It is reasonable to assume that the countryside was not well-electrified, Japan was still only 10% urban in 1900, so it would have been very expensive. But as urbanisation increased and the countryside also became more and more dense, we know that practically all of Japan was electrified by 1925.