To the Editor

I thank Professor Togo Tsukahara for pointing out the typos of Japanese terms in my book Technology of Empire: Telecommunications and Japanese Expansion in Asia, 1883-1945, reviewed in Technology and Culture 53 (2012): 461-64. However, I am perplexed by his characterization of the book as a "history of telecommunications in Japan," and by his dismissive remark that the book's content is already familiar to historians of technology in Japan and China. My first two background chapters acknowledge the few recent studies that examine the early history of Japanese telecommunications network and its expansion into neighboring Asian countries. The book's eight remaining chapters present, for the first time in any language, a comprehensive analysis of the political, technological, ideological, and economic underpinnings of Japan's vast telecommunications operations in East and Southeast Asia between 1931 and 1945. They are based on several hitherto unexplored archival collections in Japan and China, as well as on the documentation by Japanese participants. If Professor Tsukahara knows of Japanese and Chinese scholarly works that have covered similar ground, he is welcome to share them with this author, as well as with the readers of this journal.