Science for the Empire: Scientific Nationalism in Modern Japan (review)

In this fine book, Hiromi Mizuno addresses questions about the discursive relationship of science to nationalism and modernity in interwar and wartime Japan. Japan's place in world history—whether as the first great non-Western power, or as a belligerent in World War II, or as one of the world's largest economies—depends upon excellence in science and technology. Nevertheless, few works among the English-language scholarship on Japan have centered on science, and the best of those that have, for instance works by Ann Jannetta and James Bartholomew, have focused on the transition from Tokugawa to Meiji or on the Meiji era.¹ Mizuno approaches her questions through careful analysis of the published writings of technology-bureaucrats, Marxist intellectuals, and popular science writers, all of whom argued from the 1920s for the construction of a scientific Japan. Touching upon matters as diverse as the first engineers' trade union, Marxist histories of mathematics in Japan, and the beginnings of science fiction, Mizuno makes a convincing case that the interwar and wartime periods were crucial for the formation of Japanese technocracy.

Mizuno begins Science for the Empire: Scientific Nationalism in Modern Japan where Bartholomew left off, with World War I, when the value of industrial production first exceeded that of agricultural production and science and technology thus became integral to Japanese life. To counter the Anglo-French blockade of Germany that severed Japan's access to its customary supply of chemicals, pharmaceuticals, and precision instruments, the government inaugurated investment in research and development. The establishment of the Soviet Union at the end of the war prompted critics of the existing order to form labor unions and inspired interest in intellectual Marxism. Discussions of science and technology reached a popular audience through the contemporaneous explosion of print mass media made possible by the implementation of universal primary education.

The two chapters on Miyamoto Takenosuke, a civil engineer in the Home Ministry and founder of the Kōjin Club, highlight the anomalous status of engineers and thus complicate our understanding of the relationship between the proletarian political movement and the experts employed in the government bureaucracy. Miyamoto formed the Kōjin Kurabu (which translates roughly as "craftsmen's club") in 1920 to unite engineers and demand access to political power. To remedy their subordination to the more privileged graduates of the law faculties of imperial universities, the club's members first made common cause with labor unions and proletarian political parties. By the mid-1920s, stridently leftist speakers such as Abe Isoo replaced the staid representatives of the governmentsponsored Kyōchōkai as speakers at Kōjin Club meetings. Failing to develop a unifying class identity, however, the engineers then united around the value of their scientific expertise for national development. Despairing of finding a place for their expertise within the home islands, technocrats turned their attention to the imperial frontier, particularly Manchuria. When war broke out in China in 1937, these government-employed engineers believed that as experts they should manage the distribution of resources to win the war and maintain the empire.

In the largest section of the book, Mizuno examines Japanese Marxist conceptualizations of science and nation. Whereas technocrats placed their trust in the universal validity of science, Marxists discovered that even mathematics, the purest of the sciences, had a basis in class relationships. Ogura Kinnosuke, a mathematician influenced by Marxist thought, drew on historical class analysis to argue that during the Renaissance the Arabic and Indic-based arithmetic of the emerging commercial classes replaced the magical, Greek-based arithmetic of the church. Ogura believed that a scientific spirit based on education in practical mathematics was crucial for Japan's achievement of modernity; he criticized Japan's existing practice of science as feudalistic and bureaucratic.

In the 1930s, discourse on science was highly contested among liberals, Marxists, and nationalists. In 1932, Ogura helped to organize the Yuibutsuron Kenkyūkai (abbreviated as Yuiken; Study Group on Materialism), an association through which, despite...