Science and technology have been hot topics in the field of Japanese history. Recent books, such as those by Daqing Yang, Hiromi Mizuno, and Janis Mimura, have convincingly argued for the importance of technology in understanding Japanese expansion.Footnote 4 In Constructing East Asia, Aaron Stephen Moore seeks to contribute to this lively subfield by considering technology as an ideology that Japanese elites used as a means to mobilize the nation, beginning in the wartime era and continuing into the postwar period, as Japan remade itself into an economic superpower.
Moore presents a historical examination of what he calls the “technological imaginary” (p. 3). In essence, he looks at how different actors, such as engineers, intellectuals, and bureaucrats, employed the term “technology” to provide meaning to their plans for imperial Japanese society. As such, the kinds of technology Moore examines in the book range from documentary films to dam construction, urban planning, and even establishing financial institutions. This requires some analytical dexterity on Moore's part to link these widespread and at times seemingly unrelated concepts within the technological imaginary to argue that technology as a whole represented a “system of power that dynamically incorporated people's hopes and desires into mechanisms of social control” (p. 5).
Organized thematically, each chapter explores different expressions and applications of the technological imaginary. Chapter 1 presents an intellectual history of Marxist thinker Aikawa Haruki and his contribution to the imaginary. Interestingly, leftists like Aikawa were some of the earliest and strongest contributors to the imaginary because they viewed technology in terms of productivity and efficiency. They considered technology to be a way to overcome Western-style capitalism on their path to socialist revolution. In their goal of creating a maximally productive economy, leftist intellectuals shared much in common with Japanese engineers and technology bureaucrats.
Engineers, and specifically Miyamoto Takenosuke, are the focus of chapter 2. The establishment of Manchukuo and, later, the war in China were a boon to the careers of Japanese engineers who desperately sought to raise their social status by contributing to Japan's goal of developing the continent through its program of “East Asian Construction.” Technology was central to their mission, as Miyamoto and other engineers viewed it as “comprehensive social management coordinated with popular mobilization toward the establishment of a rational, optimal, and efficient socio-economic system” (p. 83).
Chapters 3 and 4, the book's most innovative and convincing chapters, explore the implementation of the technological imaginary in large-scale projects on the continent. As engineers and technology bureaucrats moved from the drawing board to the project site, they quickly ran into unforeseen obstacles such as incomplete knowledge of local conditions, organizational rivalries, and resource shortages due to the war. Japanese urban planners constructing a new city in suburban Beijing (known as New Town) in the early 1940s confronted labor shortages due to workers fleeing to the partisan countryside and design demands from the Japanese North China Expeditionary Army for a more easily defensible city. The adjustments by the technology bureaucrats to these local conditions meant that the technological imaginary was shaped not only in the metropole but also in the periphery.
In chapter 4, Moore uses two massive public works projects, the Fengman Dam on the Songhua River and the Sup'ung Dam on the Yalu River, to show the technological imaginary's “actual power effects” (p. 152) on the colonized subjects on the continent. In constructing these two dams, the Japanese employed various types of power, including police, legal, and bureaucratic power, to relocate local residents and fulfill quotas for laborers. To obtain and employ the technical expertise necessary for continental dam building, Japanese technological elites were forced to utilize these different “techniques of power” (p. 152), thus showing once again the intertwined relationship between technology and imperialism.
In chapter 5, Moore covers the more familiar story of the reform bureaucrats, especially the writings and thought of Mori Hideoto. Mori's vision of a planned economy was infused with technological discourse. As Moore contends, technology for reform bureaucrats like Mori represented “the productive mechanisms of life” (p. 191) and was rooted in an individual's “creative energies and imagination” (p. 192). Mori merged this conception of technology with his fascistic policies to form a new mode of power to mobilize the nation in pursuit of the renovation of capitalism.
The technological imaginary's role in mobilizing people continued beyond the war and played a part in Japan's economic rebirth. Moore traces this legacy in his epilogue but explains that it is not all positive, linking it to, among other negative consequences of economic development, the Minamata pollution disaster.
As noted earlier, Moore is adding to a currently vibrant research area. Although his chapters on the Japanese engineers and the reform bureaucrats share much in common with the work of Mizuno and Mimura, the chapters on the effects of the technological imaginary on the continent, in contrast, break new ground by synthesizing intellectual, cultural, and political histories into a coherent and compelling argument for the centrality of technology in Japan's wartime empire. Still, one reason for its centrality is that the technological imaginary was composed of whatever Japanese elites considered technology to be. Technology was whatever they said it was. This makes the concept so broad that comparing different expressions of it, say, constructing a dam or founding a central bank, can at times feel analytically slippery.
But that is Moore's point: the discourse on technology was so pervasive that it impacted every aspect of Japanese life during the Asia-Pacific War and indeed after it. The importance of this point makes Moore's book a welcome addition to the field of the history of science and compels readership among those interested in intellectual history and the histories of Japanese imperialism and transwar continuities.
