Teikoku Nihon no kagaku sisou-shi 帝国日本の科学思想史 [Essays on the History of Scientific Thought in Imperial Japan] ed. by Toru Sakano and Togo Tsukahara (review)

The difficulty surrounding historical studies of modern science in Asia, especially in East Asia, induces an impulse to describe modern science in Asia more simply than it actually was. In the nineteenth century, modern science began to be introduced actively to East Asia. So then, how should its historical environment be visualized? How can the framework of the nation-state be positioned in that context? The edited volume Essays on the History of Scientific Thought in Imperial Japan adopts the word empire in its challenging attempt to answer these questions. In an era when Japan was expanding and becoming an empire, how did people in East Asia face science and technology of Western origin? How was it adapted and institutionalized? And how was the remnant that could not be included within science and technology extracted socially? All these questions are examined in this book. Its attempts to describe the process of the spread of modern science are based on experiences gained from a series of studies rooted in the Needham Question, which examines the process together with the simultaneous spatial expansion of Western Europe. How was the spread of science and technology during an age of Western expansion and colonization experienced both in Western society and in other regions including colonized space? The studies in this book consist of extraordinary chains of rereading of historical materials of memories, often recorded as individual experiences in various forms.

In reflecting on the experience of empire and modern science in East Asia, it is important to consider the experience of imperial Japan critically as well as describing it as a conflict between West and non-West. And it is also important to consider how we should evaluate Japan's wartime defeat in 1945. At least the discontinuity between prewar and postwar was emphasized and the remains of prewar society was criticized during the Cold War. With the Cold War ending, arguments emphasizing the continuity between pre- and postwar have attracted attention (Yamamoto 2018). This book suggests a new viewpoint to comprehend the continuity between pre- and postwar Japanese society compared with the case that talents, organizations, and institutions enabling Great Britain's global spread in the nineteenth century had been inherited by international organizations of the present day, such as the United Nations. In the preface, it is explained that "Great Britain's world system of science" was changed into a UN regime reorganized by consensus building and international approval in the UN under a postcolonial situation generated through independence and nonaligned movements in former colonies, all amid the tensions of Cold War structures. Whether Western or non-Western, almost all researchers and experts, including myself, would approve of this historical perspective. And yet, with this perspective it might be difficult for us to describe or reread the historical materials.

The process of memorizing and historicizing experiences accumulated during the age of colonial empires—with all its multifarious dominations and subordinations, plundering and appropriation, destruction, obedience, adaptation, and resistance—cannot be faced with emotional equanimity. Furthermore, such emotional turmoil is not only created inside each person but also resonates with the political unsettledness of present-day East Asia, where Cold War structures still remain. Setting a sharp historical crease in 1945 and emphasizing that discontinuity between prewar and postwar might have granted a temporary peace of mind as a forgotten memory of wartime for those who, either willingly or unwillingly, acquired new citizenship both in and outside Japan during the Cold War. However, such forgetting would only be irresponsible and feeble given the continuing wars and military tensions in East Asia. In addition, it resulted in an attitude of parasitizing the Cold War's regime. In the Japanese context especially, the editors of this volume pay attention to tackling in a more detailed and delicate way the history of...