On Walter E. Grunden's Secret Weapons and World War II: Japan in the Shadow of Big Science

BOOK REVIEW On Walter E. Grunden’s Secret Weapons and World War II: Japan in the Shadow of Big Science (Modern War Studies.) xi + 335 pp., figs., app., bibl., index. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2005. $39.95 (cloth) Hiroaki Tanaka Received: 9 April 2007 /Accepted: 9 April 2007 / Published online: 25 January 2008 # National Science Council, Taiwan 2008 The Asia-Pacific War caused by Imperial Japan in the first half of the twentieth century is an important topic for the East Asian STS studies. It was an event which vastly changed the interrelationships among science, technology, and society in Japan and the other East Asian countries and areas. And it also affected the postwar developments in these countries and areas in various ways. We cannot fully understand the present STS issues in East Asia without knowing the changing STS interrelationships in the war, but studies on this topic are still in the rudimentary stage. In Japan since the 1980s the historical studies on wartime science and technology in Japan and its former colonies have been progressing and, in recent years, transnational cooperation with European and Asian scholars has begun, good examples of which are the contributions of Japanese scholars to the publication of this international STS journal. However, the English-language literature on Japan’s wartime science and technology was very scarce, probably because of linguistic barriers on both the Japanese and non-Japanese sides. Grunden’s Secret Weapons and World War II is the first English-language book on this topic and is extensively based on numerous Japanese as well as English-language sources available at present. Walter E. Grunden, associate professor of history at Bowling Green State University, Ohio, USA, studied modern Japanese history, modern Chinese history, and the history of science during his graduate school days at the Ohio State University and the University of California, Santa Barbara. He wrote his Ph.D. thesis in 1998 entitled “Science under the Rising Sun: Weapons Development and the Organization of Scientific Research in World War II Japan.” Secret Weapons and World War II is a revised and enlarged version of his Ph.D. thesis, especially East Asian Science, Technology and Society: an International Journal (2007) 1:251–254 DOI 10.1007/s12280-007-9015-4 H. Tanaka (*) Department of the Humanities and Social Sciences, Tokyo Denki University, 2-2 Kanda Nishiki-cho, Chiyoda-ku, Tokyo 101-8457, Japan e-mail: tanakahi@cck.dendai.ac.jp drawing upon Japanese-language sources collected during his stay in Tokyo in 2001–2002. Focusing on the development of several advanced, so-called “secret” weapons, Grunden examines science and technology mobilization in Japan during World War II. For comparison, he begins each chapter with an outline of weapons development and science mobilization of the other principal belligerents (the United States, Great Britain, the Soviet Union, and Germany). In the Introduction, Grunden raises two questions: What impact did science have on the war; and what impact did the war have on science in Japan? Although he says that the latter is “perhaps the more significant and interesting question,” the succeeding chapters are concerned with the former question. The discussion about the latter question appears only in the Epilogue. Chapter 1, “Mobilizing Science and Technology for War,” gives an overview of the development of Japan’s science and technology policy as well as its science and technology mobilization system from World War I to 1945. Grunden concludes: “Thus, a picture emerges wherein conflict plagued the Japanese system from the macro level of government organization to the micro level of the individual scientist in the laboratory, whether military or civilian. Japan was unable to mobilize its science and technology infrastructure to its full capacity during World War II largely as a result of the polycratic nature of the national government and the ubiquitous interservice rivalry” (p. 46). We might summarize his argument in the following manner: The Japanese failed to mobilize science and technology and were unable to make any advanced weapons. In contrast, the Americans successfully mobilized science and technology and were able to make and use advanced weapons such as atomic bombs, which contributed to the American victory over Japan. This is the impact...