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  • Science for the Empire: Scientific Nationalism in Modern Japan
  • Eiko Maruko Siniawer (bio)
Science for the Empire: Scientific Nationalism in Modern Japan. By Hiromi Mizuno. Stanford University Press, Stanford, 2009. 288 pages. $55.00, cloth.

How was it that various intellectuals, policymakers, and writers with disparate, even conflicting, views of science ended up contributing to the national mobilization of science in wartime Japan? How was it that these thinkers ultimately converged to serve the wartime state? These are the questions at the heart of Science for the Empire, which is a well-crafted history of the discourse of science from the 1920s to the 1940s. Author Hiromi Mizuno provides us with a serious examination of how science became bound up with the nation and introduces the novel concept of "scientific nationalism."

Science, Mizuno informs us, was a battleground in these decades, a place where debates about what was scientific reflected and promoted certain conceptions of nation, empire, and modernity. Three particular groups were spurred on by the various political and economic changes of the 1910s to engage in what Mizuno terms "the politics of the scientific" (p. 95), and each is the focus of one part of the book—the technology-bureaucrats, or technocrats; Marxist intellectuals; and popular science writers.

The technocrats, largely civil engineers who worked in the government bureaucracy, promoted the importance of scientific expertise to leverage their own political power vis-à-vis the law-bureaucrats—but their concerns had not always been framed in national terms. In the early years after its founding in 1920, an engineers' group known as the Kōjin Club stressed the significance of engineers as "creators" who sought to improve society through "rational means" (p. 25). In the mid-1920s, the organization attempted to capitalize on the vocabulary and ideas of the proletarian [End Page 451] movement, describing the Kōjin Club as "a trade union based on class consciousness" (p. 31). Seeking empowerment by invoking class struggle, the engineers tried to portray themselves as oppressed workers. But this conceptual framework did not resonate because it did not quite fit—the technocrats could not square being ordinary workers with their education and technological expertise.

In search of a way to unite and organize engineers, and disenchanted with party politics, technocrats turned away from class and toward the nation in the late 1920s. They made a case for their usefulness to the nation, forging a middle path between "'irrational' Marxism" (which was less scientific in comparison to technocracy) and "the equally 'irrational' extreme right" (which relied on mythologies rather than the rationality of science and technology) (p. 42). Not only did the technocrats discuss their worth in national terms but in the 1930s they came to exhibit "technological patriotism" (p. 43)—asserting that scientific and technological advancement alone could be seen as distinguishing Japan as superior to China and arguing that technology was necessary to develop the empire and ensure Japanese victory in the war. It was this technological patriotism, not class consciousness, that was able to unite and mobilize technocrats in support of a rationally scientific, wartime Japan.

The Marxist intellectuals had a very different definition of a scientific Japan than the technocrats. They viewed social scientific considerations of political and economic structures as a kind of science, while the technocrats did not. They stressed the idea of science as universal, while the technocrats did not. And they attributed Japan's unscientific nature to the country's incomplete modernity, while the technocrats pointed their finger at the lack of technocrats in leadership roles. But in the context of the 1930s, the scientific discourse of the Marxist intellectuals took a direction that had the unintended consequence of serving the interests of both the technocrats and the state. As a way of pushing back against an increasingly unscientific state that evoked the "Japanese spirit," members of the Yuibutsuron Kenkyūkai, or Yuiken, began to debate the idea of the "scientific spirit." In grappling with the relationship between the scientific spirit and the Japanese spirit in the mid-1930s, Yuiken came to defend science by emphasizing Japan's scientific tradition, thus merging the scientific and the Japanese. Yuiken Marxists such as Saigusa Hiroto...

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