Constructing East Asia

Technology, Ideology, and Empire in Japan's Wartime Era, 1931-1945

By: Aaron Stephen Moore

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Hardcover | 19 June 2013

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Hardcover
328 Pages

Dimensions(cm)
22.86 x 15.24 x 2.24

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The conventional understanding of Japanese wartime ideology has for years been summed up by just a few words: anti-modern, spiritualist, and irrational. Yet such a cut-and-dried picture is not at all reflective of the principles that guided national policy from 1931-1945. Challenging the status quo, Constructing East Asia examines how Japanese intellectuals, bureaucrats, and engineers used technology as a system of power and mobilization-what historian Aaron Moore terms a "technological imaginary"-to rally people in Japan and its expanding empire. By analyzing how these different actors defined technology in public discourse, national policies, and large-scale infrastructure projects, Moore reveals wartime elites as far more calculated in thought and action than previous scholarship allows. Moreover, Moore positions the wartime origins of technology deployment as an essential part of the country's national policy and identity, upending another predominant narrative-namely, that technology did not play a modernizing role in Japan until the "economic miracle" of the postwar years.

Industry Reviews

"[I]nformative and illuminating ... Highly recommended." - P. L. Kantor, CHOICE "Paying careful attention to the ways that technological and colonial development co-produced and challenged each other, Moore's story respects the archives of both text and practice ... It is a fascinating case study that informs a larger global historiography of the modern technosciences, while also using the social study of technology to extend the historiography of Japanese empire." - Carla Nappi, New Books in East Asian Studies "An expertly written and cogently argued study, singular in its skillful combining of intellectual, cultural, and politico-economic history. Moore breaks new ground in particular by showing how Japanese engineers in the 1930s and early forties strove to make 'concrete' expanded notions of technology through infrastructure projects on the continent." - Steven J. Ericson, Dartmouth College "Constructing East Asia offers a robust counterpoint to the standard narrative of imperial Japan dominated by fanatical ultra-nationalists steeped in irrational Shinto spiritualism. Instead, we find technocrats - otherwise rational actors grounded in science - deploying the 'technological imaginary' to rationalize colonial exploitation and imperial designs on the Asian mainland. Moore's scholarship is exceptionally thorough, precise, and often provocative." - Walter E. Grunden, Bowling Green State University

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