Constructing East Asia: Technology, Ideology, and Empire in Japan's Wartime Era, 1931-1945 / Edition 1

by Aaron Stephen Moore

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780804785396
Publisher:	Stanford University Press
Publication date:	06/19/2013
Pages:	328
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

Aaron Stephen Moore is Assistant Professor of History at Arizona State University.

Read an Excerpt

Constructing East Asia

Technology, Ideology, and Empire in Japan's Wartime Era, 19311945

---

By Aaron Stephen Moore

Stanford University Press

Copyright © 2013 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8047-8539-6

---

Excerpt

CHAPTER 1

Revolutionary Technologies of Life

The Intellectual Appropriation of Technology

In his 1941 book Ideas on Technology, the philosopher of science Saigusa Hiroto observed that the term "technology" (gijutsu) had become prominent in Japan's public discourse only from the mid-1930s as the state began to mobilize engineers, technicians, and skilled workers for the "construction of Asia." "Today, a new world is being made," he emphasized, and "it is only natural for technical people to be sought after as new things are being made in industry, economics, politics and even in ideology, literature, and the arts." In this wartime context of political, economic, and cultural "construction," technology was associated more with creation and production in general rather than solely with physical machinery and artifacts. The enormous literature on technology in the public sphere and the predominance of such terms as "technological spirit," "technological culture," "technological science," and "technological mobilization" attested to the emergence of a distinct technological imaginary as well as the contested nature of the term in wartime Japanese society.

Throughout Japan's 1930s and 1940s, debates over the meaning of technology raged across the political spectrum, particularly among bureaucrats, intellectuals, and engineers. On the one hand, far right-wing ideologues and politicians pushing for a Showa Restoration viewed technology as something that was steadily eroding Japan's spiritual vigor, as well as traditional emperor-centered values of community and agrarianism, or tried to formulate a unique "Japanese Science and Technology." On the other hand, many engineers, bureaucrats, and businessmen viewed technology's spread throughout all areas of life as a key to resolving worsening social ills, and they campaigned vigorously for the introduction of rational techniques of management and administration throughout society. Along with "culture" (bunka) and "nation" (minzoku), "technology" was an important lens through which Japanese elites defined Japan's modernity during a period of total war and empire. An important characteristic of this discourse was that for many, technology was not just accepted as the "value-neutral" machines and productive mechanisms of society, but rather, technology's very nature was questioned and redefined. In fact, technology was more and more equated with the production of all of society, not only of its laws, institutions, ideologies, social organization, and economic structure but of its citizens and subjects as well. As Victor Koschmann points out, it was interpreted more and more "in performative or existential terms, as signifying certain ways of thinking, acting, or being, or even as representing certain qualitative virtues, such as rationality, creativity, or an ethic of responsibility." In sum, technology became a signifier through which Japanese intellectuals worked out solutions to some of the pressing problems of capitalist modernity, such as social inequality, spiritual alienation, and the structure and future shape of Japan's economy.

Although Marxist and leftist intellectuals became largely peripheral figures during the war because of increased state repression, their role in shaping the social scientific discourse behind state policy has been widely recognized. They were the first to introduce the main issues regarding technology's meaning and role in modern capitalist society to a wide range of academics, engineers, bureaucrats, and the general reading public. They launched the "Debate over the Theory of Technology" (1932–35), which centered on whether technology was primarily "objective" as opposed to "subjective." Did technology primarily consist of instrumental tools, machinery, and infrastructure, they asked, or did it also significantly involve subjective will, imagination, and ethics? The debate introduced people to the subjective, creative aspects of technology and made parallels between technology and other processes of "making" in the realms of politics, education, and the arts. At stake for Marxist and leftist intellectuals, however, was the relationship between technology and social transformation—how could technology become truly integrated into people's lives as a force for revolutionary change and human development instead of existing as an external force of spiritual alienation, unemployment, and exploitation under modern capitalism? The Soviet Union's "socialist construction" campaigns to empower the proletariat through technical education and the promotion of science and technology in everyday life offered a beacon of hope to Japanese Marxists and prompted them to examine this question in terms of Japan's particular capitalist conditions.

This chapter examines the technological imaginary among Japanese leftists, primarily through the work of Aikawa Haruki (Yanami Hisao), a leading theorist of technology during the war. Although it is more understandable for bureaucrats and engineers to have supported and articulated a view of technology as representing values of productivity, rationality, and creativity given the wartime requirements of mobilization and Japan's avowed mission to "construct East Asia," it is less clear why leftists critical of the state developed similar ideas. In fact, before his arrest in 1937, Aikawa stuck to a strictly materialist definition of technology as the physical system of the means of production and analyzed its role in exacerbating the contradictions of Japan's "semifeudal" capitalism. His primary goal back then was to understand technology and capitalist reproduction in the interests of "liberating" the means of production from capitalist control, which had transformed technology into a force for alienation and exploitation. Why did such Marxists as Aikawa abandon their more limited, materialistic view of technology as the capitalist means of production in favor of a broader idea of technology as the economic, social, and cultural processes (i.e., technologies) that organized and produced all aspects of life? What was the allure of this type of thinking among leftists such that they even began articulating similar ideas put forth by wartime bureaucrats and engineers of transforming society into a type of rationalized, productive social mechanism that involved the willful, active participation of all of its members? Answering this question helps us understand the powerful appeal of the technological imaginary and the values associated with it, which continued to grow in strength during Japan's postwar high-speed economic growth era.

These questions gained particular importance in the immediate postwar era when newly empowered leftist intellectuals debated the nature of "free and democratic" subjectivity in response to what they perceived as an "immature" or "irrational" subjectivity that they argued was responsible for Japan's descent into totalitarianism and war. In the realm of theory of technology, the physicist Taketani Mitsuo and his followers put forth the well-known definition of technology as the "conscious application of rule-governedness in human (productive) praxis" in response to what they saw as "fascist" wartime theories of technology that emphasized blind subservience to values of productivity. Taketani's theory, which carved out an autonomous space for human subjectivity and praxis, seemed relevant to the democratic struggles taking place among scientists in Japan's laboratories and universities, and more broadly, to Japan's rapid technological transformation in the late 1950s and 1960s. According to Taketani, the rise of a spirit of independent and rational scientific inquiry among engineers and the general populace would bring about the advancement of the productive forces, which would ultimately conflict with the outmoded, irrational relations of production, resulting in increased class struggle and ultimately socialist revolution. Yet as Koschmann notes, such a conception of technology as fundamentally rational would not necessarily prevent the opposite effect, namely, the advancing productive relations becoming the basis for the increasing technical rationalization and systematization of society and thereby the incorporation of class and social conflict. By dismissing the war merely as a period of irrationality, atavism, and spiritualism, postwar leftist intellectuals missed some of the specific ways that technology could be used to mobilize "free and democratic" subjectivity, and instead celebrated what they saw as a distinctly "rational" postwar technological development.

As discussed in the book's introduction, the emerging discourse on technology during the war among bureaucrats, engineers, and intellectuals must be understood as part of a larger process of change in how power operated and was articulated in modern Japan rather than simply as a tool of an irrational totalitarian regime. As Yamanouchi Yasushi argues, during this period of intense social, political, and cultural mobilization for total war beginning in 1937, the nature of power shifted from being something wielded repressively from above to being resituated and systematized into various institutions and people within society. Borrowing a term from Talcott Parsons, Yamanouchi argues that Japan shifted from being a class society of clearly defined realms of state and society to more of a "system society," like many other modern societies at the time. Class and other types of social conflict were continuously subject to technical rules and institutionalized as part of an idealized social mechanism. Politics became more about resolving technical problems and mobilizing subjects for state goals than posing alternative, conflicting visions of society. More important, this emerging wartime "system society" continued in various forms—for example, in the system of institutions that co-opted the strong public sympathy for the antinuclear movement into support for nuclear power—during the postwar period of high-speed economic growth.

In line with contemporary trends in Europe and the United States, Japanese bureaucrats, technical experts, and intellectuals from across the political spectrum played an important role in conceiving a systematized Japan during the 1930s and 1940s, specifically by extending the meaning of technology to include the production of all aspects of life. Leftists played an especially active role in shaping the technological imaginary primarily because they had already developed a large body of research dedicated to a systematic understanding of the Japanese economy and therefore easily adapted their methodology to other realms of society. During the war, Marxist intellectuals, such as Aikawa, abandoned class as the primary lens to analyze and organize society in favor of an idea of society as a complex mechanism of actively mobilized subjects and institutions that revolutionized all areas of life. In this way, they began sharing a belief with government technocrats in the transformative power of state planning combined with corporatist mass mobilization. In the same manner that technocratic thinking was easily incorporated into different national regimes and ideologies around the world, Japanese Marxists articulated a notion of a technologized wart ime system society to achieve their own specific objectives of socialist modernization and revolution. But in the end, their critical vision of a systematized society rooted in the energies of the people lent itself to the state's technological imaginary of creating a more efficient social machine for wartime mobilization and empire.

Examining Aikawa's voluminous and diverse body of work on technology provides insight into the extent to which Marxist intellectuals envisioned a modern "system society" and how it might operate. His vision of a fully technologized society challenges the popular image of wartime Japan as primarily rooted in authoritarian violence, spiritualist ultranationalism, and a pervasive atavism. More important, it reveals some of the rational techniques of power and mobilization taking shape at the time in the form of the technological imaginary, which postwar leftist intellectuals overlooked within their simplistic narratives of the wartime period as "irrational" and their self-promotion as the leaders of a movement for a more rational, democratic, and prosperous Japan. Whereas wartime Marxists possessed a naive belief in the technical systematization of society, many postwar Marxists largely ignored the issue and claimed that technology could be controlled through the development of a strong "rational subjectivity" rooted in humanism and democracy. An analysis of Aikawa's notions of the technicized society, the "technological economy" in Asia, and "cultural technologies" reveals how such a free and rational subjectivity could also be mobilized for the pursuit of war, empire, and other state objectives that undermined the development of a democratic civil society.

The Origins of Theory of Technology

Japanese intellectuals were well aware of the debates on the nature of technology occurring in Europe and the United States in the early twentieth century. With the spread of the machine throughout all areas of life and the construction of large and complex technological systems in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, intellectuals throughout the industrialized world began to grapple with the meaning of technology and technological development. Unlike in the nineteenth century, when the discourse was largely characterized by a romantic rejection or an enthusiastic welcoming of specific technological artifacts, the early twentieth-century debate centered on the larger project of technological development itself and the nature of life within a world saturated by technology. In Germany, for example, such intellectuals as Oswald Spengler, Werner Sombart, and Max Weber and such businessmen as Walter Rathenau attempted to "assimilate" modern technology into more familiar discourses of German Kultur or state economic planning (Planwirtschaft) in order to come to terms with some of technology's harmful effects, such as devastating warfare, massive unemployment, and spiritual alienation. In the United States and Europe, Taylorist ideas of technical rationality in the factory lent themselves to utopian visions of overcoming class conflict by reorganizing society along the lines of a coherent system of efficiency, optimality, and productivity. This manifested itself in various forms throughout the world, such as the technocracy movement in the United States, St. Simonianism in France, Stakhanovism in the Soviet Union, and futurism in Italy—all of which proposed differing versions of an optimal social mechanism managed by experts and run by highly skilled, creative workers dedicated to overcoming class conflict and social inequality. In sum, with technology's rapid proliferation and development throughout all areas of life, commentators began to formulate new concepts to capture that experience of social transformation in accordance with their specific historical or cultural context. By actively "appropriating" technology, intellectuals incorporated it into wider "discourses of modernity," thereby shaping the modernization process itself. Technology was no longer new or novel, nor was it something that could simply be isolated or romantically rejected as in the nineteenth century.

In fact, in the United States—widely viewed as the pinnacle of modern technological civilization in the early twentieth century—t he term "technology" was not even widely used as a general term for artifacts, machines, and technical systems until after World War I or perhaps not even until the Great Depression, according to Leo Marx and Eric Schatzberg. Other terms, such as "useful arts," "manufacturing," "industry," "invention," "applied science," and "machine," were used instead to describe what is now generally subsumed under "technology." As Germany rapidly industrialized in the late nineteenth century, a sophisticated discourse on Technik arose among engineers; however, it only developed into a wider debate in the early twentieth century, when engineers and intellectuals attempted to define the relationship between Technik and Kultur and understand the relationship among Technik, Wirtschaft (economy), and Kultur. Thus, the term "technology" not only was more widely used in the early twentieth century but also began to be defined more broadly and in less material or artifactual terms. This coincided with the proliferation of large and complex technological systems throughout the industrialized world, which blurred the boundaries between the artifactual and other components, such as the "conceptual, institutional, and human." In this context, intellectuals began to define "technology" in more subjective or metaphysical terms and to expand its realm into the fields of economics, administration, social policy, and culture.
(Continues...)

---

Excerpted from Constructing East Asia by Aaron Stephen Moore. Copyright © 2013 by Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. Excerpted by permission of Stanford University Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

---

Table of Contents

List of Figures ix

Acknowledgments xi

Introduction: The Technological Imaginary of Imperial Japan 1

1 Revolutionary Technologies of Life 21

2 Technologies of Asian Development 64

3 Constructing the Continent 102

4 Damming the Empire 150

5 Designing the Social Mechanism 188

Epilogue: Legacies of Techno-Fascism and Techno-Imperialism in Postwar Japan 226

Notes 243

Works Cited 281

Index 303

Editorial Reviews

"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."

Bowling Green State University - Walter E. Grunden

"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."

Michigan War Studies Review - Walter Skya

"[I]nformative and illuminating . . . Highly recommended."

CHOICE - P. L. Kantor

"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."

Pacific Affairs - Victor Seow

"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."

Journal of Japanese Studies - W. Miles Fletcher III

"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."

Dartmouth College - Steven J. Ericson

"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

"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 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

"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

"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
"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
"[I]nformative and illuminating . . . Highly recommended."—P. L. Kantor, CHOICE
"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
"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
"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

From the Publisher

"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."

American Historical Review - J. Charles Schencking

"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."

New Books in East Asian Studies - Carla Nappi

"Moore is to be thanked for opening up a fascinating line of inquiry in the burgeoning historiography of postwar Japan."

Journal of Northeast Asian History - Miriam Kingsberg

"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."

Japan Review - Juergen P. Melzer