Engineering War and Peace in Modern Japan, 1868–1964 by Takashi Nishiyama (review)

The kamikaze fighter and the Shinkansen (bullet train) evoke modern Japan’s close association with technology during the two eras of total war mobilization and high-speed economic growth. Takashi Nishiyama seizes on these two artifacts of war and peace to analyze Japan’s rapid technological transformation during the twentieth century. Departing from histories that overly emphasize the continuity or discontinuity of factors from wartime that enabled Japan’s postwar rise into a technological superpower, Nishiyama provides a well-researched, nuanced study of the country’s technological transformation primarily through the lens of the everyday conflicts, negotiations, and activities of aeronautic engineers across the 1945 divide. As a result of this bottom-to-top approach, we see how Japan’s radical transformation was often the product of unplanned and conflict-ridden exchanges between various “engineering communities” and other social actors rather than primarily a deliberate, systematic, top-down program. Nishiyama therefore highlights the dynamic, tension-filled process of modern Japan’s technological transformation in a way that defies simple categorization under broad policies, ideologies, or historical trajectories.

Chapter 1 describes the close relationship between war and technological progress from the Meiji era through World War II by analyzing the formation of its engineering education infrastructure. He shows the engineering education system’s extensive nature and the engineers’ high social status. Chapter 2 begins the study of aeronautic engineers by analyzing the rise of the navy’s sophisticated aviation research and development complex between 1919 and 1942, in conflict with the army’s own efforts. Through case studies of aircraft development that illustrate the interplay between social and technical factors, Nishiyama provides a detailed view of the navy’s “engineering culture,” which unexpectedly laid the basis for Japan’s postwar technological success (p. 51). Chapter 3 examines the activities of aeronautic engineers toward the war’s end, when they navigated severe demands as the tide turned against Japan, culminating in the kamikaze fighter’s development. While their nationalism drove them to support such a perverse project, their engineering culture’s autonomous nature simultaneously led to efforts to develop safety mechanisms for the doomed pilots.

Chapter 4 details how total defeat and the reconfigured power landscape enabled the diffusion of wartime engineering knowledge within Japan toward non-weapons technology. Chapter 5 examines the formation of the “basic sociotechnical infrastructure for the civilian application of wartime technology” by analyzing how former military engineers brought their expertise into the railway industry to address issues of railway safety (p. 123). Chapters 6 and 7 focus on the development of high-speed railway by analyzing the conflict-filled process whereby former military engineers incorporated their research culture into the Railway Technical Research Institute, as well as how the postwar context of defeat and demilitarization laid the basis for the convergence of forces culminating in the Shinkansen’s launch in 1964.

Nishiyama’s use of a variety of non-traditional sources to analyze the story of Japan’s technological development on the ground provides an important corrective to histories that focus on larger-scale factors such as ideology, sociotechnical systems, and state policy. He states that his sources constituted the faint traces of Japan’s “silent majority” in sharp contrast to the well-formulated statements of national ideologues, policymakers, and leaders (p. 197). His attention to detail, complexity, and nuance enable us to see the messy, entangled histories that top-down studies often miss. At times, however, there could have been stronger conclusions that more clearly connected the book’s fine details to the broader historiographical issues of continuity/discontinuity, technology’s role in sociocultural transformation, or the pitfalls of “top-down” histories, and larger points could have been woven more into the narrative itself.

For example, while members of the “silent majority,” such as aeronautic engineers, did not make the same type of clearly formed ideological statements on science and technology as national opinion leaders—and, therefore, should not be...