The Postwar U.S. Policy toward Japan and the Revival of Japanese Technology: The Introduction of TV Broadcasting and Atomic Power in Japan and Hidetoshi Shibata by Kenzo Okuda (review)

Kenzo Okuda is an independent historian of technology studying the relation between U.S. and UK foreign policy and Japanese technology during the cold war. Using mainly the manuscripts and documents of the Japanese journalist Hidetoshi Shibata, who mediated for the U.S. and Japanese agents, and the related materials housed at the U.S. National Archives, Karl Mundt Library, Herbert Hoover Presidential Library and Museum, and other sites, Okuda tries to detail the influence of U.S. foreign and military policy on the beginning of TV broadcasting and nuclear power in Japan.

Okuda explains that after the breakout of the Korean War in 1950, Senator Karl Mundt, the U.S. Department of Defense (DOD), the U.S. Department of State, the U.S. Congress, and the U.S. occupation army were all eager to establish television broadcasting in Japan as anti-communist measures for psychological warfare. While Okuda admits that the Japanese side represented by Matsutaro Shoriki might have used the Americans’ backup only in order to reach his own goal of starting TV business in any way, the reader will at least comprehend that Japan’s eventual adoption of 6 MHz bandwidth and 525 scan lines was supported and favored by the DOD. This enabled the U.S. Army to use the Japanese facilities in an emergency and broadcast to the Japanese audience TV programs of Pacific Telecommunication Network, which provided commercial and military information in East Asia and Australia.

Furthermore, the newspaper Yomiuri and the Nippon Television Network Corporation, led by Shoriki and Shibata, were instrumental in spreading propaganda for the peaceful use of nuclear power, especially when anti-nuclear sentiment grew after the hydrogen bomb testing on Bikini Atoll caused radiation exposure in twenty-three Japanese fishermen in March 1954. Okuda describes Shoriki and Shibata’s effort to coordinate the visit of John Hopkins, president of General Dynamics Corporation, Ernest O. Lawrence, Nobel laureate in physics, and Lawrence R. Hafstad, director of reactor development with the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission. They met with politicians and scientists and gave lectures in Tokyo in May 1955, impressing the Japanese with their enthusiasm for a “new atomic age.” Yomiuri not only reported this event but also organized the nationwide Exhibition for Peaceful Use of Atomic Power as its own program for propaganda.

Even before the Yomiuri publications, Shoriki and Shibata’s activities for introducing TV broadcasting and nuclear power in Japan were known. Okuda, however, reveals their American counterparts’ behaviors by showing letters and documents that corresponded to those written or kept by Shibata. Though skeptical of the effectiveness of the Yomiuri Group’s propaganda, especially in the case of nuclear power, Okuda clarifies that their activities were suggested, regulated, or sometimes controlled by their American counterparts.

Okuda also points to Shibata’s peculiar view of the relation between electronics and nuclear engineering. Shibata understood that in order to develop the world of atoms, one should master the world one step before, namely the world of electrons. He therefore started with TV broadcasting that adopted top technology of electronics. In his interpretation, this meant that success in TV business provided the technological and economic basis for welcoming the atomic age. The reader may be surprised how little this key person knew about what he introduced, though Okuda perhaps does not intend that.