Anglo-American Connections in Japanese Chemistry: The Lab as Contact Zone

by Yoshiyuki Kikuchi

Overview

Anglo-Japanese and American-Japanese connections in chemistry had a major impact on the institutionalization of scientific and technological higher education in Japan from the late nineteenth century and onwards. They helped define the structure of Japanese scientific pedagogical and research system that lasted well into the post-World World II period of massive technological development, when it became one of the biggest providers of chemists and chemical engineers in the world next to Europe and the United States. In telling this story, Anglo-American Connections in Japanese Chemistry explores various sites of science education such as teaching laboratories and classrooms - where British and American teachers mingled with Japanese students - to shed new light on the lab as a site of global human encounter and intricate social relations that shaped scientific practice.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781349297962
Publisher:	Palgrave Macmillan US
Publication date:	12/18/2013
Series:	Palgrave Studies in the History of Science and Technology
Edition description:	1st ed. 2013
Pages:	279
Product dimensions:	5.51(w) x 8.50(h) x (d)

About the Author

Yoshiyuki Kikuchi is Associate Professor at the Graduate University for Advanced Studies (Sokendai), Hayama, Japan. He has published extensively on the history of Japanese chemistry in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and its global contexts. He previously taught at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA, and Harvard University, USA.

Table of Contents

1. Japanese Chemistry Students in Britain and the United States in the 1860s 2. American and British Chemists and Lab-based Chemical Education in Early Meiji Japan 3. The Making of Japanese Chemists in Japan, Britain, and the United States 4. Defining Scientific and Technological Education in Chemistry in Japan, 1880-1886 5. Constructing a Pedagogical Space for Pure Chemistry at the Imperial University 6. Making Use of a Pedagogical Space for Pure Chemistry 7. Connecting Applied Chemistry Teaching to Manufacturing Epilogue: Departure from Meiji Japanese Chemistry

Editorial Reviews

'In this fluent account of the dynamic interplay between individual English and American chemists and their Japanese students in three continents, Kikuchi provides a vivid analysis of how different styles of teaching and research affected attitudes to pure and applied chemistry. His brilliant demonstration of the different cultural functions of professors and assistants, and of the laboratory as a two-way contact zone for cultural exchanges, provides an important model for historians of chemistry.' - William Brock, Emeritus Professor of History of Science, University of Leicester, UK

From the Publisher