Japanese Colonialism and its Sciences: A Commentary

Japanese Colonialism and its Sciences: A Commentary Gregory Clancey Published online: 13 March 2008 # National Science Council, Taiwan 2008 There is clearly much work to be done on science in the Japanese colonial empire and on colonialism as a category in the Japanese sciences. Political considerations are partly to blame for delaying this research program, though we seem now at the point where Japanese, Korean, Taiwanese and other scholars can work productively together. That the present volume includes, for example, a Korean scholar of Japanese science writing about Taiwan (Kim) demonstrates how cosmopolitan the STS research community in East Asia is becoming, and what stands to be accomplished by both individual and group effort. Likewise, the founding of the East Asian STS Network (and this journal) bodes well for the likelihood that longneglected issues relating to knowledge creation in Japan’s colonial empire will attract attention, and from multiple perspectives. What then, are some of these issues? In choosing to write about meteorology, seismology, and bacteriology, the authors in this volume have focused on sciences with more to reveal about knowledge creation and social control than about wealth creation and strategic positioning. The ‘cultural turn’, in other words, so long in coming to historical scholarship on science in Asia, is being made. Race, for example, is a category of interest to all three papers, and one extending beyond social history to the content and practice of science. The old model of “transfer” has also ceased to be controlling. The authors rather seek contrasts in the character of science projects in colony and metropole, with knowledge sometimes traveling in both directions, or even outside the frame. The military emerges as a player in two of the three papers, and the Pacific War is a major event, not an empty watershed between “pre-” and “post-”. Japanese science is approached in all three accounts more for what it might tell us about colonialism than developmentalism, representing a maturation toward a search for something closer to the texture of the colonial experience. East Asian Science, Technology and Society: an International Journal (2007) 1:205–211 DOI 10.1007/s12280-008-9025-x G. Clancey (*) Dept. of History, Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, National University of Singapore, 11 Arts Link, 11570, Singapore e-mail: fasgkc@nus.edu.sg Overshadowing the developmental problematique is a new concern with vulnerability. All three science projects discussed here relate to knowledge of (and control over) natural hazards of some sort—i.e. typhoons/droughts, earthquakes, and epidemic disease—emphasizing that a significant part of science’s colonial mission was keeping disaster at bay. It is worth noting that, to an unusual degree, the potential catastrophes at the root of all three science projects were shared by colony and metropole alike, the Japanese nation-state having a particularly close experience with violent and mortal nature. This makes Japanese claims to be rendering colonial landscapes more benign—or in some cases, describing them as particularly threatening—all the more fascinating. The theme of vulnerability, even if not given full expression in every paper, reminds us that we are still bringing contemporary concerns and understandings to our scholarship on Japanese colonialism, which is both inevitable and, given the right emphasis, potentially illuminating. An even more fundamental change represented by these papers and other recent scholarship is a formative dislocation of “the colonial” itself, as a distinct realm of research activity in the history of science. If we are no longer discussing the simple “transfer” of science projects from centers to peripheries, and if the hazards which such projects reveal are shared by metropole and colony alike, then what is the proper geographic frame for our studies, and what do we call this place? By the same token, can we continue to describe scientific practices, ideas, or institutions as being “colonial” when the thrust of much recent scholarship is the excavation of intricate networks rather than the privileging of particular nodes? An emerging frame we might consider, and which I will discuss later in this essay, is “multi-local”. But first let me consider the restrictive nature of our traditional choices. The term “colonial science”, coined by George Basalla (1967) in a...