Jürgen P. Melzer is a professor of modern Japanese history at Yamanashi Gakuin University in Japan and a former Lufthansa pilot. Based on his Princeton dissertation, Wings for the Rising Sun provides a contextual and transnational examination of Japanese aviation—both military and commercial—from 1877 to 1945. He focuses on technology, public attitudes toward aviation, and the international diplomacy of airpower.
Part one explores early Japanese aviation from 1877 to 1918, with interesting discussions of “balloon fever” in Japan and the boost given to early aviation by the Russo-Japanese War and, most especially, the outbreak of World War I. Part two considers German influences on Japanese aviation in the interwar period, while part three examines the same time period but is more concerned with the British influence on Japanese naval aviation. Part four concludes the volume by analyzing Japanese aviation technology through World War II, with the most attention given to Japanese jet and rocket technology in the total war against the Allied Powers. An epilogue provides a summary of Japanese aviation after 1945 to tie together the book's major themes and conclusions. Well-written and groundbreaking in its scope and depth of research, Melzer's book delivers on its promise of providing a fresh historical perspective on Japanese aviation.
Above all, Melzer's transnational focus makes the book relevant to historians of East Asia and aviation technology. Rather than simply summarizing the particular path followed by Japanese aviation while referencing trends happening abroad, Melzer dives deep into the archives to explore largely unknown aspects of the transitional transference of aviation technology and expertise, mainly between Japan, Germany, France, Britain, and, perhaps most surprisingly, the United States. Pursuing this novel approach, Melzer makes two significant overarching points. First, Japan did not passively receive aviation technology from abroad but made truly original contributions to its own and the broader global development of aviation. Melzer makes this point effectively in his discussion of Japanese academic networks involved in aeronautical research. Second, the transnational sharing of knowledge could drive innovation but could not always overcome a multitude of factors serving to obstruct technological innovation. For example, military conservatives in the Imperial Japanese Army and Imperial Japanese Navy “showed little inclination to consider unorthodox ideas or experiment with new concepts,” thereby restraining Japanese aeronautical innovations (p. 267).
Aviation historians and historians of technology will find that Melzer's book substantially deepens our understanding of transnational sharing of aviation technology in the early twentieth century. Of particular importance, he challenges commonly held Western assumptions of Japanese technological backwardness, especially the false notion of their “slavish” imitation of Western designs (pp. 202, 233). As Melzer shows, virtually every facet of Japanese aviation technology—including rockets and jets—was impacted by domestic Japanese innovations. In fact, Melzer maintains that a Japanese “tech support network” emerged to institutionalize innovations in aviation despite some entrenched institutional opposition. To its advantage, Japan built upon a tradition of selectively acquiring foreign technology while adding new improvements through their own innovations. Melzer avoids simplistic analysis and gives consideration to multiple factors that furthered Japan's technological progress. In particular, competition with other powers drove the policy of oitsuki, oiskose (catch up and surpass) to overcome the apprehension shared by Japanese military innovators of falling behind the global technological curve.
Japanese governmental, military, and commercial elites engaged in public relations efforts to mobilize support for aviation development. As in other countries that possessed the industrial base capable of developing a robust domestic aviation sector, popular aviation enthusiasm emerged in Japanese culture and society. Melzer notes several commonalities between the Japanese experience and the contemporaneous American enthusiasm in particular. The top-down mobilization of popular interest was made possible by close collaboration with the press. Ultimately, Melzer shows that Japanese aviation was propelled by a sense of enthusiastic air-mindedness, exemplified by the 1925 “visit Europe flight,” which was promoted by the Asahi newspaper and drew a crowd of 150,000 people.
The impact of international diplomacy constitutes a final theme. Provisions of the Treaty of Versailles allowed Japanese observers to gain an intimate understanding of German aircraft manufacturing and popular aviation enthusiasm while leading to an illicit arrangement between German and Japanese aircraft manufacturers. During the international disarmament wave of the 1920s, Japan used the scaling down of battleships to shift its focus to aircraft carriers, benefitting from transnational networks in naval aviation. By the 1930s, Japan could test is military aviation in several campaigns on the Asian mainland and, with the most devastating results, against the United States and Allied powers in the Pacific War. Thematically compelling, methodologically innovative, and grounded in extensive archival research in multiple countries, Melzer's work constitutes a major contribution to multiple fields of historical inquiry and should attract wide interest.
