The History of Technology in Japan and East Asia

The History of Technology in Japan and East Asia Gregory Clancey Received: 15 October 2009 /Accepted: 15 October 2009 /Published online: 21 November 2009 # National Science Council, Taiwan 2009 Keywords History of Technology. History of Science . STS . Science, Technology, and Society To the extent that “the history of technology” exists in Japan and East Asia as a discipline, literature, or coherent collection of problems or approaches, it does so in an often limnal form. “The history of science” is also a relatively small discipline in this part of the world (as elsewhere), but is more clearly locatable and demarcated in the form of groups and individuals whose identity is bound up with that project.1 In a 1990 survey, Mats Fridlund found that there were about 950 persons in the various Japanese organizations of the history of science and technology, but that only about 10% of them were dealing with technology as opposed to science. At that time, there were four professorships in the history of technology in Japan, although most of these were qualified by reference to other sub-fields, such as economics and industrial psychology. “The general climate of the history of technology is quite cold” one Japanese professor told Fridlund, but was in “the fermentation stage” (Fridlund 1993).2 This is not fundamentally different than the situation today, almost 20 years later, at least as regards formal institutionalization. This is an odd situation on the face of it, given that countless people on every continent identify Japan and East Asia with “technology” and would think that East Asian Science, Technology and Society: an International Journal (2009) 3:525–530 DOI 10.1007/s12280-009-9108-3 1 The History of Science Society of Japan was established as early as 1941, and its flagship journal Historia Scientiarum began publishing (under an earlier name) in 1962. 2 Fridlund found that the category itself was elusive. One course in Chuo University called “The History of Science” was, despite its name, almost entirely about technology. Two “pure” graduate programs in the field existed, at Osaka City University and Tokyo Institute of Technology. The latter was the largest such program in Japan, located in the Dept. of Social Engineering. The Graduate Program in History and Philosophy of Science at Tokyo University also trained students in the history of technology. These programs continue today. G. Clancey (*) National University of Singapore, Singapore, Singapore e-mail: hisgkc@nus.edu.sg questions such as “how did East Asia become so entranced with both the production and consumption of advanced technology?” would be a primary focus of academic inquiry here. Of course some very established disciplines purport to answer this and related question using statistics, models, empirical data about production, and the most advanced political, economic, and social theories. But the “technology” remains a black box in most such accounts, not humming, lighting up, breaking down, or taking inordinate amounts of daily time and creative energy. It “develops,” but often according to an evolutionary model which has little connection to lived reality, nor is particularly explanatory in the end. Despite all this, we may be on the cusp of learning more about the history of technology in Japan and East Asia right now than we have at all points in the past combined. We seem to be experiencing a shift in emphasis across a range of disciplines that will bring “technology” and “Asia” into sharper convergence, and historical methodologies will inevitably come into play. Whether this will be called “the history of technology” remains to be seen. I personally think that this is an excellent category within which to organize inquiry, but other more interdisciplinary rubrics such as “Science, Technology, and Society” (STS) and “Science and Technology Studies” are catching attention and enthusiasm in Asia often in advance of the institutionalization of their specific Western disciplinary strains (or even subsuming them). Whereas in North America STS was constructed with the history of technology as one pre-existing component, in Asia, it is often developing the other way round, with the enthusiasm for STS as an interdisciplinary field developing new constituencies for older projects and transforming them in the process. The institutionalization of many academic disciplines in East...