Constructing East Asia: Technology, Ideology, and Empire in Japan’s Wartime Era, 1931-1945 1st Edition
by Aaron Stephen Moore (Author)
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The conventional understanding of Japanese wartime ideology has for years been summed up by just a few words: anti-modern, spiritualist, and irrational. Yet such a cut-and-dried picture is not at all reflective of the principles that guided national policy from 1931–1945. Challenging the status quo, Constructing East Asia examines how Japanese intellectuals, bureaucrats, and engineers used technology as a system of power and mobilization―what historian Aaron Moore terms a "technological imaginary"―to rally people in Japan and its expanding empire. By analyzing how these different actors defined technology in public discourse, national policies, and large-scale infrastructure projects, Moore reveals wartime elites as far more calculated in thought and action than previous scholarship allows. Moreover, Moore positions the wartime origins of technology deployment as an essential part of the country's national policy and identity, upending another predominant narrative―namely, that technology did not play a modernizing role in Japan until the "economic miracle" of the postwar years.
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「大東亜」を建設する 新刊
帝国日本の技術とイデオロギー
序説 帝国日本の技術的想像力
技術超大国としての日本
近代日本における科学技術概念を再考する
技術と日本型ファシズム
日本の技術的想像力
技術と日本帝国主義
本書の射程
第一章 生活を革新する技術
知的側面からみた技術の位置づけ
技術論の淵源
日本における技術論
実践的技術論――技術を社会そして生活に溶け込ませる
理論と政策――近代化と動員のための政治技術
偉大なる東亜の技術的経済
映画の文化技術
結論――戦後の相川の活動と、彼の思想が暗示するもの
第二章 アジア発展のための技術
社会の管理者としての技術者
二○世紀初頭日本における技術者と技術者地位向上政策
ソースタイン・ヴェブレンと日本技術者運動の知的背景
技術者と技術文化の形成
帝国のための技術者――「総合技術」のはじまり
テクノクラシーを目指して――「技術の立場」に基づく計画化
技術を通じて主体を変革する
日中戦争と総合技術の制度化
技術と東亜新秩序への中国の統合
技術者と興亜院の結成
アジア開発と戦時態勢――北部中国における産業五か年計画
結論――帝国主義的ナショナリズムとしての技術
第三章 大陸を建設する
戦時中の満州国と中国における技術
「総合技術」の制度化――南満州における遼河治水計画
「アジアを開発する」――日本人技師たちの中国進出
都市の技術的想像力――「汎アジア」的北京を事例として
ダムと総合的地域計画の進展
結論――総合技術という亡霊
第四章 帝国をダム化する
水力発電と総合技術
日窒帝国と朝鮮工業化の基礎としてのダム
河川を合理化する
ダムを計画し設計する
大自然との相撲――ダム建設と河川管理
「東亜建設」への異論――ダム建設の社会経済的な効果
土地の買収と住民の移動における植民地権力
労働者を動員し規律化する
結論――技術の力を自然化する
第五章 社会機構を設計する
革新官僚の技術的なヴィジョン
創造的エンジニアと経済技術
東アジアの新秩序を設計する
国民生活組織と日本国民の創造的エネルギー
社会機構を「人間らしく」する
汎アジアナショナリズム
「東アジアの経済構築」に向けて
結論――技術、ファシズム、そして権力
終章 戦後日本におけるテクノ・ファシズムおよびテクノ帝国主義
解説 藤原辰史＋塚原東吾
参考文献一覧
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Editorial Reviews
Review
"An expertly written and cogently argued study, singular in its skillful combining of intellectual, cultural, and politico-economic history. Moore breaks new ground in particular by showing how Japanese engineers in the 1930s and early forties strove to make 'concrete' expanded notions of technology through infrastructure projects on the continent." (Steven J. Ericson Dartmouth College)
"[I]nformative and illuminating . . . Highly recommended." (P. L. Kantor CHOICE)
"Constructing East Asia challenges us to see Japanese technocrats, their professional aims, their continental objectives, and the realities of their undertakings in Northeast Asia in new, sometimes rational, ways . . . Constructing East Asia is a solid and at times engaging study of the tantalizing allure of technocratic modernity as a force of rationalization and development both in Japan and in Northeast Asia. It reminds us that Japan's colonies were not blank slates awaiting uncomplicated exploitation and development. Academics and graduate students interested in science, technology, engineering, and empire will find much about this book rewarding." (J. Charles Schencking American Historical Review)
"Aaron Stephen Moore's Constructing East Asia is one of several recent important studies that offer a corrective by revealing just how fundamental technology was to the shaping of interwar and wartime Japan . . . [I]t is among the few truly innovative studies on the Japanese empire to come out in recent years. It is, for one, an excellent example of how one might integrate intellectual history with histories of empire, technology and political economy. Constructing East Asia should be of much interest not only to historians of modern Japan and East Asia, but also to those interested in the politics of technology and the intellectual foundations of sociotechnical regimes." (Victor Seow Pacific Affairs)
"Paying careful attention to the ways that technological and colonial development co-produced and challenged each other, Moore's story respects the archives of both text and practice . . . It is a fascinating case study that informs a larger global historiography of the modern technosciences, while also using the social study of technology to extend the historiography of Japanese empire." (Carla Nappi New Books in East Asian Studies)
"Aaron Moore's discerning and persuasive book should be required reading for anyone seeking to understand Japan's failed attempt to develop an East Asian empire. It offers a breathtaking exposé of the arrogant fantasies of the 'rational' technocrats, engineers, and reform bureaucrats who led Japan into the abyss." (Walter Skya Michigan War Studies Review)
"Constructing East Asia deserves praise for bridging the disciplinary gap across the technological and intellectual divide. Moore inspires his readers to take a more comprehensive view of colonial modernity that pays close attention to the history of specific artifacts, even as it takes into account the dynamic interplay of power, technology, and ideas." (Juergen P. Melzer Japan Review)
"Moore is to be thanked for opening up a fascinating line of inquiry in the burgeoning historiography of postwar Japan." (Miriam Kingsberg Journal of Northeast Asian History)
"Aaron Stephen Moore's Constructing East Asia provides important new insights into wartime Japan by examining the various manifestations of the concept of 'technology' and its meanings in different contexts . . . One innovative aspect of Moore's work is its analysis of not only aspects of the discourse about technology among intellectuals and civil servants but also the concrete applications of theoretical concepts about technology by engineers." (W. Miles Fletcher III Journal of Japanese Studies)
"Constructing East Asia offers a robust counterpoint to the standard narrative of imperial Japan dominated by fanatical ultra-nationalists steeped in irrational Shinto spiritualism. Instead, we find technocrats―otherwise rational actors grounded in science―deploying the 'technological imaginary' to rationalize colonial exploitation and imperial designs on the Asian mainland. Moore's scholarship is exceptionally thorough, precise, and often provocative." (Walter E. Grunden Bowling Green State University)
About the Author
Aaron Stephen Moore is Assistant Professor of History at Arizona State University.
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CONSTRUCTING EAST ASIA: Technology, Ideology, and Empire in Japan’s Wartime Era, 1931–1945 | By Aaron Stephen Moore
Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2013. xii, 314 pp. US$55.00, cloth. ISBN 978-0-8047-8539-6.
Pacific Affairs
There was, until not too long ago, a curious gap in the conventional narrative of technology in Japan’s modern era. While we were often told that technological developments were central to both Japan’s emergence as an imperial power in the Meiji period and its rise as an economic giant in the postwar years, we tended to hear much less about the role that technology played in the intervening decades. Aaron Stephen Moore’s Constructing East Asia is one of several recent important studies that offer a corrective by revealing just how fundamental technology was to the shaping of interwar and wartime Japan.
Specific to Moore’s analysis is his concept of the “technological imaginary”—a discursive framework in which this one term “technology” (gijutsu) came to represent various key social and political ideas for different groups of people. Moore demonstrates that Japanese elites across the spectrum, from leftist intellectuals to state planners, saw in technology and its associated ideals of rationality and efficiency foundational principles for the remaking of society in the midst of the tumultuous 1930s and 1940s. His examination extends, however, beyond just the ideological. In following the construction of a number of large-scale infrastructural projects across the Japanese empire, Moore also shows how the technological imaginary was realized on the ground—a process not without contestation or compromise. The result is a wide-ranging account that invites us to rethink the workings of technology and power in imperial Japan.
Moore begins by exploring how technology was conceptualized by two contrasting groups: leftist intellectuals, represented by Marxist theorist Aikawa Haruki, and state engineers, represented by technology bureaucrat Miyamoto Takenosuke. He traces how Aikawa’s understanding of technology shifted from a materialist manifestation of the means of production to an integrated assemblage of political, economic and cultural parts geared towards not only revolutionary transformation but also wartime mobilization. If leftists like Aikawa came to see technology as encompassing all areas of life, engineers, in Moore’s telling, viewed it as a social and technical field in which they claimed exclusive expertise. Both these groups would be implicated in Japan’s imperial enterprise. Aikawa’s theoretical realignment coincided with the outbreak of the war with China in 1937. Moore suggests that Aikawa may have been motivated by the idea that this conflict would help sweep away the feudal remnants holding Japan back from a socialist revolution. He ended up producing a handful of studies on technology and the management of colonial industry that resonated with the goals of the expansionist state. Similarly, engineers such as Miyamoto too perceived potential in empire and war. Continental expansion provided them with opportunities to introduce “comprehensive technology”—large technological systems serving multiple functions—that would in turn generate employment for the beleaguered engineering class. Drawn into planning agencies within the colonial administration, engineers became embroiled in pan-Asianist developmentalist visions and the exploitation they engendered.
The manifold efforts to turn the technological imaginary into material reality form the next part of the book. Moore takes us to different parts of the Japanese empire to survey an array of infrastructural projects, from river conservancy and urban redevelopment to port construction and, most notably, dam building. While many scholars have pointed out that empire often served as a laboratory for the social and economic experiments of technocratic planners, Moore goes a step further by looking at how exactly some of these experts formulated and implemented their plans. The picture he presents is not one of neat, mechanistic efficacy so frequently attributed to technocracy, but of contingency and messiness arising from the many competing interests within the colonial context. This is, in my opinion, the strongest contribution of the book. The examples of the Fengman and Sup’ung Dams illustrate the complex constellation of factors—including land ownership, labour management, and the forces of nature—that technocrats struggled to master in their bid to build. If they met with any success, this was not merely a product of well-crafted plans, but just as much—if not more—a result of the mobilized might of the colonial state.
In the last part of the book, Moore turns to the reform bureaucrats who promoted the establishment of a “managed economy”—an integrated economic system characterized by a high degree of state intervention—in order to save Japan from the crisis of capitalism and prepare it for total war. Focusing on their chief ideologue Mōri Hideoto, he describes how technology entered the thought and ideology of this group of policy makers. It was not only about industrial development and the production of advanced armaments, but also about an elaborate and extensive mechanism of social control that Moore identifies as a new mode of fascist power. He ends with an epilogue that suggests that the wartime technological imaginary and its undemocratic impulses have persisted into Japan’s postwar era, reflecting and reinforcing contradictions underlying efforts at national reconstruction at home and at development assistance abroad.
Moore goes to great lengths to argue that technology constituted a kind of power that was just as much about the mobilization of human creativity and freedom as it was about the exercise of technocratic repression and violence. What is to be gained by emphasizing the former, though, when it was, even in his account, the latter that ultimately defined the colonial encounter? To what extent did articulations about technology serve rhetorical as opposed to purely ideological functions? In what ways did the large-scale infrastructural projects in the colonies shape the contours of technological development back in the metropole? This book raises as many questions as it sets out to answer. However, it is among the few truly innovative studies on the Japanese empire to come out in recent years. It is, for one, an excellent example of how one might integrate intellectual history with histories of empire, technology and political economy. Constructing East Asia should be of much interest not only to historians of modern Japan and East Asia, but also to those interested in the politics of technology and the intellectual foundations of sociotechnical regimes.
Victor Seow
Cornell University, Ithaca, USA
Last Revised: May 31, 2018
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Philip C. Brown
16.96The Ohio State University
Abstract
This wide-ranging, important study of technology’s role in Japan’s wartime empire will interest students of the history of technology under fascist regimes, its role in imperialist enterprises, and its place in the history of early-twentieth-century Japan. Those seeking to understand Japan’s “construction state” and its relations with East and Southeast Asian development in the post–World War II era will benefit by this examination of the antecedents. As opposed to portrayals of technology (typically conceived as artifacts) as progressive, Aaron Stephen Moore compellingly argues that technology (both ideas and artifacts) was important in shaping Japan’s regressive social order. Focused largely on Manchuria and Korea, he contends that technological and imaginative (non-rational) elements combined to shape and support Japan’s wartime enterprise, not just as material instruments of policy, but as key ideological and policy components. The Japanese adapted contemporary European and Japanese definitions of technology not only to produce new artifacts, but also to mobilize components of Japanese society (including mainland colonies) in support of empire. As presented here, technology constituted a subjective, even utopian, realm, not just an objective, rational force. “[The] technological imaginary represented something more than a politics of nationalism and technocratic planning. … [W]e also see the contours of another mode of power … based more on harnessing the creativity and vitality of human subjects than solely on repression and violence” (p. 9), a form of socially organic power that attempted to engage the creative forces of all levels of society in a harmonious whole that escaped the conflicts among elements of capitalist society. Constructing East Asia portrays political leaders, philosophers, social thinkers, engineers, and bureaucrats of the 1920s to 1940s interacting to create ideas and institutions that moved greater Japan in a generally consistent direction, even as proponents of different policies and projects disagreed with each other. In contrast to a long tradition of historical scholarship that presumes the preeminence of right-wing army officers and their imperialist designs, Moore takes these other actors seriously, analyzing how debates among them played out at theoretical levels and in specific projects such as the Liao River regional development scheme and the construction of two world-class dams, Fengman (near Jilin in Manchuria) and Sup’ung (on the Yalu River in Korea). Projects, Moore contends, were not only outcomes of emerging ideas about technology, they also were the sites within which new ideas and new bureaucratic structures converged to influence a larger trajectory of power relations. Each substantive chapter analyzes these themes through key examples. Chapter 1 is devoted to intellectuals’ evolving ideas of technology, primarily through an examination of Aikawa Haruki, a theorist. Chapter 2 takes up transformations in the thinking of engineers, focusing primarily on the career of Miyamoto Takenosuke, well known for his accomplishments in Japan as well as on the Continent. Regional planners are introduced to this mix of actors in chapter 3, which explores their work in Manchuria (the Liao River area especially), and massive dam construction in Manchuria and Korea (chapter 4). Discussions of political leaders and bureaucrats appear throughout these chapters, but one group, the “reform bureaucrats,” occupies center stage in chapter 5, especially the ideologue Mōri Hideoto. In the early chapters, Moore demonstrates the influence of socialist thought on opinion leaders, providing compelling examples of the political construction of “technology.” An epilogue explores links between these wartime developments and postwar constructionist trajectories. Throughout, Moore analyzes a wide range of historical sources: for intellectuals and theorists, their own books, articles, and speeches; laws and policy papers are used for understanding emergent policies and administrative structures; and archival records for specific projects. Certain kinds of data for Manchuria were inaccessible. (The author does not say so explicitly, but the subject of the Japanese control of the Chinese “Northeast” remains a highly sensitive issue; archives and libraries frequently deny researchers access to materials, even those published in Japan.) Moore goes to considerable lengths to compare conceptions of technology and intellectual trajectories in Japan with German scholars. He reveals similarities, of course, but more importantly, differences that demonstrate Japanese intellectual innovation, not just cookie-cutter copying. A strong sub-theme that achieves a crescendo in chapters...
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