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a n o t e o n t h e a p p e n d i x a n d s o u r c e s The socio-technological transformation in many countries has been treated as the product of some sort of artificial and inorganic system—be it military, political , economic, social, or environmental. With few exceptions, recent scholarship subscribes to some form of top-down verticality, focusing on central civilian/ military leadership, government bureaucrats, and technocrats as the “shapers” of the national and technological developments. While paying careful attention to the top-down system approach, I chose to examine Japan’s trans-war history through the lens of engineers. The engineers to whom I refer are neither technocrats , nor intellectual writers, nor business leaders who voiced their opinions broadly in writing and in media. In many ways, the engineers whose names appear in this book are different from renowned, vocal activists in political, scientific and engineering communities who actively constructed the international science or national ideology. They instead are ordinary citizens of Japan or part of the “silent majority.” More specifically, my empirical study relies heavily on accounts of former military engineers who experienced the militarization followed by the demilitarization of Japan. Trained to solve technical problems—seeing the details in the bigger picture, seen mistakenly as passive agents of technological transformation—many of these engineers have often left traces of their thoughts in a series of design drafts, diaries, memos, minutes, detailed calculations, and operation manuals. These sources are difficult to obtain and decipher, but they reveal more than the technical challenges that these individuals faced; they reveal the engineers’ struggles, remorse, and joy in (re)constructing technology and culture for different needs in society, while forming their own identities and communities for engineering war and peace. Thus, my study employs a bottom-up approach as well as archival, nonarchival, and biographical sources. Engineers in this study seem to loom larger than usual. To be sure, neither technology nor en- 198 A Note on the Appendix and Sources gineers solely drive history, nor should they offer a simple and singular panacea to our understanding of the complex interplay involved in technological change. Tracking the career paths of the engineers was possible mainly because public institutions kept their directories. My focus is directed at their education as well as research and development projects in public institutions. Private organizations failed to record such information or kept such information, but did not disclose it for the sake of privacy. The directories I gathered from archives and personal networks are rich with information, including engineers’ names, dates of birth, addresses, phone numbers, military ranks/positions in the institutions, educational backgrounds (i.e., fields of study and years of graduation), and the year in which they retired. Access to these types of records is normally highly restricted. But they are detailed, reliable, and useful when they become accessible through various means. Most of the engineers discussed in my study are highly educated with baccalaureate degrees from the nation’s top universities. Some earned doctoral degrees in engineering. Information about technicians and craftsmen without college degrees is seldom available, or it is not detailed enough to observe career transitions in trans–World War II Japan. Thus, these experts do not occupy the center stage of my study. My study also relies on personal interviews with former military engineers and/or their relatives. Direct interviewing is inherently problematic. People often craft their own history. They are always right in their own ways. Informants remember what they want to remember and, thus, knowingly or unknowingly, recall what they want the interviewer to remember and record. Memory is inherently fragile; it fades, often conveniently. Remembering and forgetting are equally motivated; each offers clues about who the informants are. Yet interviews are resourceful and useful when used cautiously. Sources, written or otherwise, can be checked against one another. Different perceptions of the “same” events can be compared, assessed, and put together to grasp a fuller picture of the “same” event. For these reasons, I directly interviewed several key trustworthy individuals at least four times over two years, while consulting other evidence that supported or undermined their stories. First, direct interviewing was always fraught with issues, such as a lack of a rapport between the informants and the interviewer. Some former wartime engineers were more antiAmerican than nationalistic; they harbored lingering anti-American sentiment, and some were suspicious of my affiliation with American institutions. While the...

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