Science for the Empire: Scientific Nationalism in Modern Japan / Edition 1

by Hiromi Mizuno

Overview

This fascinating study examines the discourse of science in Japan from the 1920s to the 1940s in relation to nationalism and imperialism. How did Japan, with Shinto creation mythology at the absolute core of its national identity, come to promote the advancement of science and technology? Using what logic did wartime Japanese embrace both the rationality that denied and the nationalism that promoted this mythology?

Focusing on three groups of science promoters—technocrats, Marxists, and popular science proponents—this work demonstrates how each group made sense of apparent contradictions by articulating its politics through different definitions of science and visions of a scientific Japan. The contested, complex political endeavor of talking about and promoting science produced what the author calls "scientific nationalism," a powerful current of nationalism that has been overlooked by scholars of Japan, nationalism, and modernity.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780804776561
Publisher:	Stanford University Press
Publication date:	12/21/2010
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	288
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

Hiromi Mizuno is Associate Professor of History at University of Minnesota, Twin Cities.

Read an Excerpt

Science for the Empire

Scientific Nationalism in Modern Japan

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By HIROMI MIZUNO

Stanford University Press

Copyright © 2009 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8047-5961-8

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Chapter One

Toward Technocracy

INTERNATIONALLY, during the 1910s elite engineers began to demand higher status and access to political power. Technocrats (technology-bureaucrats) in Japan, too, responded to the rapid development of heavy industrialization and the rigorous promotion of research and development by organizing themselves to make such demands. Civil engineers in the central government were particularly active in this technocrat movement. They were in charge of the development of the nation's land but had very limited access to policy-making power as a result of the discriminatory Civil Servant Appointment Law (bunkan nin'yorei). The fierce friction between technology-bureaucrats and law-bureaucrats was at the core of the technocracy movement in Japan that would later shape the Japanese Empire's science and technology policies based on the technocratic definition of science, "science-technology." At the center of this technocratic movement was Miyamoto Takenosuke, an engineer in the Civil Engineering Bureau in the Ministry of Home Affairs.

This chapter looks at the early stages of the technocraticmovement (1920-32) through Miyamoto and an engineers' organization he founded in 1920, the Kojin Club, whose objective was to unite engineers and demand access to political power. The trajectory of the Kojin Club demonstrates how a belief in science and rationality was closely related to class formation and nationalism. As large-scale technological networks were changing Japan's industrial and socioeconomic landscape, the Kojin Club engineers drew upon the proletarian movement to construct their own class consciousness in their efforts to unite engineers. But they soon abandoned the language and politics of the proletarian movement because they could not translate their engineering background into a unifying class identity. Rather, it was the "scientific" expertise that they realized affirmed their identity as a group regardless of class. The nation rather than class-industrial rationalization rather than class struggle-provided the language and ideology needed to transform their cultural capital into political power. Their trial-and-error search for an engineer's identity led them to develop their technocracy.

Although the term "technocracy" (tekunokurashii) was introduced to Japan only after it became a buzzword in the United States in the early 1930s,2 the history of the Kojin Club demonstrates that Japanese engineers had begun to develop their own technocracy well before that. "Technocracy" has been defined in various ways, but it generally entails the rule by experts, technological determinism, and the belief that technological considerations render politics obsolete. I add to this common definition of technocracy that nationalism is often an important ingredient, at least until a recent global trend toward regional economic blocs (such as the European Union) rendered the nation-state less meaningful to technocratic governance. I use "technocrats" interchangeably with elite "technology-bureaucrats" (bureaucrats in the central government with degrees in engineering, agriculture, forestry, and other technical and professional fields), and "technocracy" for a specific vision of governance that these technocrats developed based on their definition of science. As such, Miyamoto and his engineer colleagues' movement to access political power was both justified and inspired by their concern for the nation.

Miyamoto and Kojin Club members also remind us that technocracy, whether in Japan, the United States, or Europe, was proposed as an alternative to Marxism and thus competed with it to be the better solution to the economic and labor crises of the early twentieth century. Trust in science, although defined differently by Marxists, played a central role in their claim to offer better management of society. Like Marxism, technocracy was critical of the existing capitalist management of society, but unlike Marxism, which called for the ruling of society by the proletariat made possible by the "scientific" observation of the history of a society, technocracy called for management of the nation by engineers with "scientific" expertise. In Parts 1 and 2 of this book, I will demonstrate that the rivalry between technocracy and Marxism did not come only from the competing visions of an ideal society; it also came from their competing definitions of the "scientific."

Defining Engineers as Creators

The founder and leader of the Kojin Club, Miyamoto Takenosuke, was an ambitious and talented man with leadership capability. Miyamoto was born on Gogo Island, Ehime Prefecture, in 1892 to a once-wealthy merchant family. The decline of his family's fortune forced him to leave junior high school and find a job as a sailor when he was fourteen. With the help of his brother-in-law and a wealthy acquaintance, however, he was later able to enter a private junior high school in Tokyo. A smart, hardworking student, Miyamoto was always at the top of his class; in fact, his grades were so excellent that he was admitted to First Higher School (daiichi koto gakko), the most prestigious high school in prewar Japan, without taking the entrance examination. As expected of First Higher School graduates, he went on to Tokyo Imperial University and graduated in 1917 as the "silver watch" student of the Engineering Department (in prewar Japan the top imperial university students received a silver watch from the emperor). The same year, he entered the Bureau of Civil Engineering in the Ministry of Home Affairs. He worked on the nation's two largest river improvement projects, the Tone River project and the Arakawa River project, and proved himself to be a young leader in ferroconcrete construction, a cutting-edge field in engineering. After a state-funded study trip to Europe and the United States (1923-25), he steadily moved up the ladder in the bureaucracy, eventually to the vice-ministerial position, the highest rank that any bureaucrat could attain.

Miyamoto was also a remarkably prolific writer. In addition to numerous technical writings, he published nine books on technology and society written for a general readership and was a regular contributor to the Kojin Club's monthly publication, Kojin, and other journals. This was highly unusual for engineers, especially for an engineer-bureaucrat. In fact, Miyamoto had once wished to become a writer. During his junior high years, he became attracted to literature, compiled three collections of original works, and seriously considered becoming a literary writer. This was the time in late Meiji Japan when elite youths began to ponder the meaning of life beyond material success-as portrayed well in Natsume Soseki's Kokoro (1914)-and naturalist literature seized the mind of youths like Miyamoto. Only after his brother-in-law persuaded him not to pursue his interest in literature did Miyamoto decide to major in engineering at First Higher School; he came to agree with his brother-in-law that literary life was a decadent, self-indulgent life of "the weak" and "the crippled." Miyamoto, instead, resolved to lead "a manly, splendid life" that was devoted to the improvement of society. He found this "manly, splendid life" in becoming an engineer in the central government.

The "weak," in Miyamoto's mind, not only meant self-indulgent literary writers but also included the poor and the powerless. He was rather sympathetic to the latter but from an elitist perspective. Miyamoto was already greatly interested in labor issues in junior high school and read leftist newspapers such as Heimin shinbun and Yorozu choho to learn about the poor working conditions of destitute workers. He stated in his diary in 1915 that "I have sworn to fight for the human race and help the weak.... Oh, how miserable the fate of the weak is. I wish to never forget my responsibilities, to always believe in myself, and to work relentlessly toward my true vocation." 9 Miyamoto was convinced that engineers had a special obligation to solve labor issues because they could mitigate conflicts between laborers and factory owners through technology. He was never interested in joining the labor struggle; he wanted to manage conflicts rather than engage in them. Even though sympathetic to the weak, he differentiated himself from them. As is also clear from his thoughts on literary writers, Miyamoto's elitism led him to look down on the weak and to see himself as their "manly" savior. Historian Oyodo Shoichi rightly describes him as someone who strove to serve society through the ideal of management (keiseika).

One large hurdle in the way of Miyamoto's ideal of a "manly, splendid" life was the low status of engineers in government offices and in society at large. Considered to be mere technical experts, engineers in public and private offices rarely attained positions powerful enough to direct the nation, companies, and factories. As in the West, where many professional engineers began to demand more power in politics and society in the 1910s, World War I raised the consciousness of elite Japanese engineers and their level of frustration with the status quo. For technology-bureaucrats, this had a concrete meaning. Civil servant engineers were subject to the Civil Servant Appointment Law and the Civil Servant Examination Rule, which together prevented them from attaining high-ranking positions. These positions were reserved for law-bureaucrats, those who studied in the department of law. The Civil Servant Appointment Law stipulated that only those who passed the higher civil servant examinations could be appointed to top positions such as vice-ministers, chiefs of bureaus, and section chiefs. Engineer-bureaucrats were exempted from the examination because it was written specifically for students majoring in law, covering no technical and scientific fields. They were instead hired as bureaucrats through separate appointment. The overwhelming majority of those who passed the examination before 1945 were Tokyo Imperial University law students, with a very small minority of economics majors. Among thousands of students who passed, only a handful were engineering majors ambitious enough to prepare for and pass the exam. This systematically excluded engineer-bureaucrats from the conventional career paths in government offices.

For example, a successful career course for a law-bureaucrat would entail graduating from Tokyo Imperial University, passing the civil servant examination, moving around various sections and bureaus to be trained to be a generalist while climbing the bureaucratic ladder, and ultimately becoming a bureau chief or vice-minister. In contrast, technology-bureaucrats stayed in one section or bureau for their entire careers as specialists, and it took longer for them to be promoted. For engineers and other technical experts, the highest attainable position was "vice-minister for technological affairs" (gikan) in a ministry, but even this position was placed under the vice-minister of a ministry, the position held by law-bureaucrats. This system also created a wide gap in salaries between law-bureaucrats and technology-bureaucrats, as much as a difference of ten times at the point of retirement. Some technology-bureaucrats became bureau chiefs and section chiefs, but these were rare cases of individuals who skillfully used their political connections.

Believing that technocrats as a whole deserved to be treated better, technocrats in various ministries began to voice their frustration during World War I. In 1918, leading engineers in industry, the universities, and the central government established Koseikai, the first political association of engineers, to pressure the government to amend the Civil Servant Appointment Law. In the same year, Furuichi Koi (1854-1934), a civil engineer and president of Kogakkai (Japan's first academic association of civil engineers), together with twenty other established civil engineers, submitted a recommendation to the government, requesting the revision of the Civil Servant Appointment Law. The following year, Noseikai (the association for those with agriculture degrees) and Rinseikai (the association for those with forestry degrees) were established based on Koseikai's model. Together, the three associations submitted a petition to the prime minister to amend the law. No meaningful response reached them, however. The government's reaction was disheartening to Japan's engineers: though the Civil Servant Appointment Law did go through minor changes, the discriminatory provision against engineers remained. When a group of young technocrats in the Ministry of Agriculture and Commerce proposed the promotion of Matsunami Yoshimi, a renowned forestry expert, to the office of bureau chief, the minister rejected the promotion because appointing a technocrat as head of a bureau would "destroy the bureaucratic order."

It was becoming painfully clear that engineers needed to do something more than occasionally send petitions. Engineers as a whole needed to organize and stand up. Naoki Rintaro, a civil engineer in the Tokyo municipal government, began writing essays in various journals advocating a new type of engineer who was more socially and politically active. His 1918 book, From an Engineering Life, is full of inspirational and motivational calls to engineers to raise their consciousness and to work toward the advancement of their social standing as well as that of the nation. Ichinohe Naozo, a former instructor of astronomy at Tokyo Imperial University, succinctly summarized the frustration that Naoki and other engineers endured. In the periodical he edited, Contemporary Science, Ichinohe urged engineers to stand up and organize themselves: "Why can't engineers try to unite themselves? Even though there are probably differences among engineers of the public sector and those in the private sector ... they are all engineers who contribute to the world of engineering. I believe they should form some kind of organization for the advancement of their social position."

Organizing the Kojin Club was Miyamoto's response to such a call. In October 1920, Miyamoto and eight other engineers gathered in an office in Tokyo and discussed plans to launch Japan's first engineers' trade union, the Kojin Club. They were all young-in their thirties-and elite engineers with Tokyo Imperial University degrees who were currently or formerly bureaucrats in the central government. Its official establishment with over two hundred members was announced in December 1921. The club made its main objectives the advancement of the status of engineers and the reform of society. Miyamoto wrote the inaugural manifesto, which clearly laid out his technocracy.

The inaugural manifesto was ambitious and radical. Since this manifesto is crucial to understanding the organization's aspirations, its politics, and the direction it would later take, I quote the text at length below. Divided into five articles, the manifesto reads as follows:

(1) Technology is a cultural creation that unites the natural sciences and technique: Technology is creation and an end, not a means; it is absolute, not relative. Culture is not created by technology alone, but human culture in a way has always been [a form of ] technological culture....

(2) Engineers are creators: Engineers are not materialists; they should go beyond materialism. It is the responsibility of engineers to actively engage in political economy through the mission of cultural creation. Our activities should not only concern one aspect of society but should embrace the whole of human life.

(3) The position of the engineer is just like the pivot of a pole: We acknowledge that the capitalistic trade union is not a healthy social institution. Capitalists and workers should not be in a master-slave relationship. Capitalists and workers, who share rights and responsibilities, are equal tools in the creation of technological culture. It is the responsibility of engineers to lead capitalists and workers.

(4) The Kojin Club is the source of the creation of technological culture: Its function and organization should include the whole society. We will establish an academic section to develop technology, a trade union section to train section, and a finance section.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from Science for the Empire by HIROMI MIZUNO Copyright © 2009 by Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. Excerpted by permission.
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.

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Table of Contents

Acknowledgments ix

Note on Transliteration xi

Introduction 1

Part 1 Technocracy

1 Toward Technocracy 19

2 Technocracy for a Scientific Japan 43

Part 2 Marxism

3 Incomplete Modernity and the Problem of Japanese Science 71

4 Mapping Marxism onto the Politics of the Scientific 94

5 Constructing the Japanese Scientific Tradition 119

Part 3 Popular Science

6 The Mobilization of Wonder 143

Conclusion 173

Notes 189

Bibliography 233

Index 253

Editorial Reviews

"[Mizuno's] work presents numerous opportunities to begin transnational inquiry, especially given the enormous soft power of the postwar Japanese state in northeast and southeast Asia . . . If Science for the Empire concisely and incisively challenges an older portrait of Japan, it offers similar questions to scholars of the nation's regional neighbors and partners."

Journal of Northeast Asia History - John DiMoia

"The book's discourse analysis approach works well—it effectively reveals how discourses about science and the scientific was bound up with a whole host of other significant ideas."

Journal of Japanese Studies - Eiko Maruko Siniawer

"[T]his is an excellent study of Japanese science from the interwar through wartime years that will stand the test of time. Mizuno has provided valuable insight into the minds of technologists, scientists, philosophers and historians of science, and writers that reveals their motivations as they related to one another, the state, and society at large. This book is a welcome addition to the small but growing literature of the history of science in Japan."

East Asian Science, Technology, and Medicine - David G. Wittner

"A very important contribution to Japanese intellectual and social history. Mizuno's book will require historians and social scientists of Japan to consider further the importance of the natural sciences, nationalism, and discourses about them for the larger field of study."

The Ohio State University - James Bartholomew

"The amount that can be read between the lines alone of this clear snapshot of the origins of certain aspects of modern Japan, which are often treated as more traditional, makes the book worth the read. The volume also fills a gap in the history of science caused by the discipline's traditionally Eurocentric focus, and is a critical contribution to the English-language history of both science and Japan."

CHOICE

"This is an important book that shows us that there was a battle over 'science' even before the war and it continued in peacetime with groups such as Minka."

Japanese Studies - Morris Low

"Mizuno's analysis also informs areas such as the economic and political roles of nuclear development, the direction of computer-related industries, and robotics. . . . In all, it is a modest gem using fresh materials and approaches to get at important issues."

Asian Anthropology - Wesley Sasaki-Uemura

"In this fine book, Hiromi Mizuno addresses questions about the discursive relationship of science to nationalism and modernity in interwar and wartime Japan . . . Mizuno argues convincingly that the concept of scientific nationalism contributes to our understanding of nationalism more generally by highlighting the inherent contradictions between national claims to difference and national aspirations to excellence in the international scientific community, which demands universal validity for its findings . . . Mizuno has produced a book that contributes to the intellectual, cultural, and social history of the world as well as Japan."

Monumenta Nipponica - Sally Hastings

"Scholars of modern Japan, and any scholars wanting to learn of the role and expectations of science and its relationship to the state, should carefully read this important work."

Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences - John E. Van Sant

"[Mizuno] brings to light some of the overlooked linkages between prewar and postwar Japan and suggests a useful means of considering some of the other instances of boosterism apparent in global history . . . [Science for the Empire] sheds additional light upon the contested nature of social change in interwar Japan and usefully supplements that growing body of work."

Canadian Journal of History - Bill Sewell

"Hiromi Mizuno describes a vigorous, wide-ranging debate over science from the 1920's into the early 1940's."

Times Literary Supplement - Julia Adeney Thomas

"[Mizuno's] work presents numerous opportunities to begin transnational inquiry, especially given the enormous soft power of the postwar Japanese state in northeast and southeast Asia . . . If Science for the Empire concisely and incisively challenges an older portrait of Japan, it offers similar questions to scholars of the nation's regional neighbors and partners."—John DiMoia, Journal of Northeast Asia History


"Scholars of modern Japan, and any scholars wanting to learn of the role and expectations of science and its relationship to the state, should carefully read this important work."—John E. Van Sant, Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences


"Mizuno's analysis also informs areas such as the economic and political roles of nuclear development, the direction of computer-related industries, and robotics. . . . In all, it is a modest gem using fresh materials and approaches to get at important issues."—Wesley Sasaki-Uemura, Asian Anthropology


"[T]his is an excellent study of Japanese science from the interwar through wartime years that will stand the test of time. Mizuno has provided valuable insight into the minds of technologists, scientists, philosophers and historians of science, and writers that reveals their motivations as they related to one another, the state, and society at large. This book is a welcome addition to the small but growing literature of the history of science in Japan."—David G. Wittner, East Asian Science, Technology, and Medicine


"[Mizuno] brings to light some of the overlooked linkages between prewar and postwar Japan and suggests a useful means of considering some of the other instances of boosterism apparent in global history . . . [Science for the Empire] sheds additional light upon the contested nature of social change in interwar Japan and usefully supplements that growing body of work."—Bill Sewell, Canadian Journal of History
"In this fine book, Hiromi Mizuno addresses questions about the discursive relationship of science to nationalism and modernity in interwar and wartime Japan . . . Mizuno argues convincingly that the concept of scientific nationalism contributes to our understanding of nationalism more generally by highlighting the inherent contradictions between national claims to difference and national aspirations to excellence in the international scientific community, which demands universal validity for its findings . . . Mizuno has produced a book that contributes to the intellectual, cultural, and social history of the world as well as Japan."—Sally Hastings, Monumenta Nipponica
"The book's discourse analysis approach works well—it effectively reveals how discourses about science and the scientific was bound up with a whole host of other significant ideas."—Eiko Maruko Siniawer, Journal of Japanese Studies
"Hiromi Mizuno describes a vigorous, wide-ranging debate over science from the 1920's into the early 1940's."—Julia Adeney Thomas, Times Literary Supplement
"This is an important book that shows us that there was a battle over 'science' even before the war and it continued in peacetime with groups such as Minka."—Morris Low, Japanese Studies
"The amount that can be read between the lines alone of this clear snapshot of the origins of certain aspects of modern Japan, which are often treated as more traditional, makes the book worth the read. The volume also fills a gap in the history of science caused by the discipline's traditionally Eurocentric focus, and is a critical contribution to the English-language history of both science and Japan."—CHOICE

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