Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2013. xii, 314 pp. US$55.00, cloth. ISBN 978-0-8047-8539-6.
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