Technology and the Culture of Progress in Meiji Japan (review)

This innovative book joins Gregory Clancey’s Earthquake Nation (University of California Press, 2006; see MN review 62:2, pp. 225–28) in bringing a cultural studies perspective to the analysis of technology transfer in Meiji Japan. Heretofore, studies of technological development in modern Japan have focused almost exclusively on the economic and technical aspects of the problem, but this book adds a consideration of the political and ideological factors at work in the Meiji government’s selection of industrial technologies in the 1870s and 1880s.

David G. Wittner concentrates on technology transfer in the early Meiji silk and iron industries, raw silk representing the country’s top export and iron a critical target of import substitution at the time. Wittner looks specifically at two major enterprises that Meiji officials established in the first half of the 1870s, Tomioka Filature and Kamaishi Ironworks. He argues that for both of these ventures, the authorities made key decisions on the basis not so much of economic rationality or technical appropriateness as of the need to legitimate the new central regime and to demonstrate to Japanese subjects and foreigners alike its commitment to “progress” and “modernity.” In maintaining that a “progress ideology” guided the government’s choice of reeling and smelting technologies, he presents early Meiji industrialization as part and parcel of the bunmei kaika or “civilization and enlightenment” movement that scholars have normally associated with sociocultural and intellectual developments rather than economic ones. Similarly, Wittner claims that as the bunmei kaika movement faded in the 1880s, the authorities sold Kamaishi and other state enterprises to private interests not just for financial reasons but also out of “beliefs in an historical development of civilizations” (p. 1): by then the government had reached a level of confidence where it no longer felt the need to establish and maintain industrial “icons” of Western culture.

Wittner covers a great deal of ground in the space of 129 pages of text. He prefaces the two case studies with an overview of Japan’s traditional reeling and smelting technologies and of industrial modernization efforts in general in the early Meiji period. In the chapter following the case studies, he connects changes in the meanings that Japanese attached to imported technology with stages in national identity formation over the first three decades of Meiji. The author has done extensive research in Japanese and Western-language materials and provides splendid illustrations of indigenous and Western-style reeling machines, raw-silk packaging labels, and the like.

Wittner’s discussion of the Tomioka case is particularly effective and engaging. He shows convincingly that an obsession with prestige and “civilization building” led the authorities to disregard the recommendation of their French adviser to construct wooden reeling devices of hybrid Japanese-European design and instead to import from France steam-powered, cast-iron machines that ended up being too pricey and complicated to serve as a model for private reelers. Although Italian reeling methods were in many ways superior to those of France at the time, Japanese officials chose French technology for Tomioka mainly because, in their eyes, France stood above Italy in the hierarchy of “civilized” nations. Private reelers modeled their factories less on the impressive, brick-faced Tomioka than on the smaller-scale, wooden mill that Maebashi domain had founded in 1870—the first mechanized filature in Japan—which employed simpler, Italian-style technology. Yet, as Wittner interestingly notes, many of those reelers bought into the symbolism and “mystique” of Tomioka and, no matter how insignificant their borrowings from that factory, claimed that they made silk using “Tomioka-style” methods (p. 52).

Wittner’s focus on ideology also sheds new light on the less-studied Kamaishi Ironworks, but some of the points he makes about this venture could stand clarification. He maintains that government officials, while ignoring much of the expert advice they had gotten in planning the ironworks, adopted “the more reasonable methods . . . but for the wrong reasons” (p. 7); in their determination to...