This is an ambitious book that connects a lot of dots. Professor Hiromi Mizuno, a historian at the University of Minnesota, marshals a diverse and cross-disciplinary treasure-trove of Japanese-language sources, from scholarly position papers to science fiction and children's magazines, in creating a framework for the study of the pursuit of science in Japan in the twinned contexts of nationalism and empire-building. Eschewing a linear focus on “official stories” or on conventional readings of both policy-makers and famous litterateurs alike, Mizuno boldly navigates through an illuminating array of sources, hitherto more or less overlooked or un(der)acknowledged in both the Japanese and Anglophone literature on imperial Japan, in demonstrating the “ideal of science-technology” (a hybrid formation) during the modern war years (roughly 1920–1945) and the continuity of that (often disturbingly compromised) ideal with very little alteration during the postwar period. Her concluding chapter is a critical tour-de-force, if condensed, presentation of the essentially seamless continuity of a “Japanist discourse” of science and its dialectical corollary, “nature,” ever since the ascendance of “technocracy” over a century ago.

Although Mizuno does not cite them, her social-historical approach reminded me of Philip Corrigan and Derek Sayer's innovative and insightful volume, The Great Arch: English State Formation as Cultural Revolution (1985). In a manner similar to their analysis of English state formation, Mizuno provides a corrective to analyses of Japanese imperialism that privilege economic and military incentives. She focuses instead on the manifold ways in which “the state”—implicitly understood in Corrigan and Sayer's terms as not a singular entity but an opportunistically collusive repertory of agents and agencies that reproduce the status quo—crafted a culturally tenacious “scientific nationalism” (as noted in her book's subtitle).

Mizuno's critique of science in the service of nationalism would be at home in Germany, where there is a virtual industry in literature that critically and reflexively exposes the inhumane consequences of the manipulation of science (which is not limited to the laboratory but is also a “contested social field”) for narrow ideological ends. With a few but slowly growing number of exceptions, historians of Japan have been less committed to connecting the “dots”—that is, to demonstrating how the various events, developments, materials, practices, and trajectories that although produced, deployed, enacted, and pursued by sundry agents and agencies, were all essential ingredients in the ongoing constitution not only of “Japanese science” but of Japanese (and Japanist) society and culture as well.

This is a slim volume given the ambitiousness of Mizuno's project. Had she expanded on all of the dots she introduces (themes, persons, media, etc.), the result would have been a multi-volume series! Instead, Mizuno presents a fleshy outline for a new, critical socio-cultural history that shows, rather than erases or ignores, the contiguities and continuities of wartime and postwar Japanese technological, scientific, economic, and political agendas and programs. Scientists, intellectuals, litterateurs, and other opinion-shapers, and their productions, prominent in the first half of the twentieth century, but disappeared or whitewashed in the postwar period, are resurrected in Science for the Empire with ample suggestions for more sustained future studies. These include Ogura Kinnosuke, a mathematician and Marxist science studies reformer; Mikami Yoshio, author of the first cultural history of (Japanese) science in 1922; the wartime Yuiken (short for Yuibutsuron Kenkyūkai, or Materialism Studies Association) and the postwar Minka (Minshusugi Kagakusha Kyōkai, or Association of Democratic Scientists); and a host of “wonder mobilizing” popular science magazines, such as Science Illustrated (Kagaku gahō, 1923–1961) and Children's Science (Kodomo no kagaku, 1924–present).

Mizuno is also refreshingly attentive the sex-gender dynamics of science education in imperial Japan, and notes the premium placed on scientific knowledge for girls and unmarried and married women alike. Although the Japanese state pursued pro-natalist policies and limited the recruitment of marriageable women for factory work, the “Rosie the Riveter” image was often used on the cover of popular magazines for children and adults. In addition to the roles played by scientists and magazines, Mizuno details the efforts of the Ministry of Education in mobilizing diverse resources toward creating scientifically minded citizens. In fact, as she points out, education minister Hashida Kunihiko coined a new term during his tenure (1940–1943), “to do science” (kagaku suru), that quickly became a catch-phrase. Today, Japanese pundits are increasingly vocal about the disinterest of all levels of students in science and the concomitant decline in basic scientific research (as opposed to application-based research) within the education system. Given the historical continuities characterizing the mobilization of science in Japan, as established compellingly by Mizuno, it is only a matter of time before kagaku suru is recuperated, via internet blogs and Twitter, as the new buzzword to energize a resurgent post-postwar Japan.