When American Historical Association President Akira Iriye first hailed the enormous potential of international history, he underscored the particularly fertile subjects of global economic and cultural flows.Footnote 8 Leave it to one of Iriye's most enterprising students to expand this vision a quarter century later to include the captivating study of global technology. Daqing Yang is perhaps best known for his uniquely transnational vision of war memory in Northeast Asia.Footnote 9 But Technology of Empire, the long-awaited revision of a Harvard dissertation, establishes Yang as a consummate historian of modern Japan, empire, and communications technology.
Yang focuses upon point-to-point, two-way electronic communications (not radio broadcasting) from the first submarine telegraph cable across the Korea Strait in the 1880s through the end of the Pacific War. In so doing, he covers familiar narrative terrain through a strikingly original lens. Japan's extraordinary nineteenth-century transformation is accentuated by the story of Japan, quite unusually, possessing a complete domestic telegraphic network at the outset of industrialization. Unification of the realm and early military victories owed, in part, to Japan's effective use of telecommunications—telegraphic relays between Tokyo and Kyushu during the 1877 Satsuma Rebellion, Japanese access to the Danish-built Korea cable during the Sino-Japanese War, and swift seizure of Korea's telegraph network during the war with Russia. Rapid creation of a formal empire was, likewise, enabled by completion of a Taiwan-Japan submarine cable in 1896 and by an extensive new network of telegraph and telephone lines in Korea.
Technology of Empire focuses primarily on Japan's early twentieth-century expansion in China. Yang sees Japan's early struggle for influence on the continent as largely the story of great power competition over telecommunications. Japan's attempt to monopolize the new post-World War I technology in interwar China, wireless, foundered in the face of Western technical superiority and China's bid for communications autonomy. But military conquest of Manchuria and northern China secured Japanese communications superiority in northeast Asia and invited a new model of communications management, the semi-private, joint-venture enterprise, the Manchurian Telegraph and Telephone Company. It also facilitated development of what was hailed as a new Japanese-style technology, the non-loaded cable. For Yang, the spread of formal empire to China after 1937 and to Southeast Asia after 1940 is much more than a story of military conquest. It involved a complex bid to establish and control telecommunications links throughout rapidly expanding imperial space.
Yang's exhaustive 446-page telecommunications survey of the Japanese empire offers powerful confirmation of several current scholarly visions of modern Japan. First, it highlights civilian complicity in military expansion. Communications Bureau employees in Japan's Kwantung Leased Territory cut off Chinese telegraph and telephone lines and censored Chinese telegrams immediately following the Manchurian Incident. And the privately managed International Telephone Company worked closely with the Japanese military to build and operate telecommunications facilities in newly occupied areas in China and Southeast Asia. Second, we have another glimpse of the enormous complexities of a rapidly expanding empire. Dramatic change spurred serious discussion and intense competition among multiple parties—the Ministries of Communications, Foreign Affairs, and Colonial Affairs; the Government General of Korea; the Manchurian Telegraph and Telephone Company: the International Telephone Company: the South Manchuria Railway: the Kwantung Army: and Japanese forces in occupied China and Southeast Asia. Third, Yang underscores how developments in the empire reverberated strongly back home. Rapidly expanding imperial communications markedly enhanced the status of the Ministry of Communications in Tokyo. And the Manchurian Telegraph and Telephone Company became the model for the Japan Telegraph and Telephone Public Corporation after the war.
Yang's most conspicuous overture to scholarly vogue is to view the global tale of telecommunications through the prism of Japanese imperialism. Clearly, there is some justification for the current fascination among Japan scholars for all things imperial. And Yang provides ample evidence of empire as a formidable driver of telecommunications infrastructure in Japan and East and Southeast Asia. But to view Japanese telecommunications primarily through the rubric of imperialism is to stigmatize Japan's experience and unnecessarily detach it from the larger history of modern global telecommunications. Yang reveals in his final chapter that most telegraphs and telephone calls made across the Japanese empire through 1940 were for business and private, not official, use. Yet he insists that Japanese telecommunications history is a story of “techno-imperialism” (p. 8) and “techno-nationalism” (p. 9) and describes the post-1945 years as a new era of “techno-nationalism, mixed with traces of imperial nostalgia” (p. 396).
Technology of Empire, in other words, examines telecommunications less to describe Japan's experience in important transnational processes (imperial expansion and the rise of modern communications) than to accentuate the peculiar internal logic of modern Japan. But for its in-depth coverage of a pivotal technical aspect of modern Japanese development, it will remain a valuable resource for specialists of Japan and of communications technology for years to come.
