Japanese Colonialism and its Sciences: A Commentary

There is clearly much work to be done on science in the Japanese colonial empire and on colonialism as a category in the Japanese sciences. Political considerations are partly to blame for delaying this research program, though we seem now at the point where Japanese, Korean, Taiwanese and other scholars can work productively together. That the present volume includes, for example, a Korean scholar of Japanese science writing about Taiwan (Kim) demonstrates how cosmopolitan the STS research community in East Asia is becoming, and what stands to be accomplished by both individual and group effort. Likewise, the founding of the East Asian STS Network (and this journal) bodes well for the likelihood that longneglected issues relating to knowledge creation in Japan’s colonial empire will attract attention, and from multiple perspectives. What then, are some of these issues? In choosing to write about meteorology, seismology, and bacteriology, the authors in this volume have focused on sciences with more to reveal about knowledge creation and social control than about wealth creation and strategic positioning. The ‘cultural turn’, in other words, so long in coming to historical scholarship on science in Asia, is being made. Race, for example, is a category of interest to all three papers, and one extending beyond social history to the content and practice of science. The old model of “transfer” has also ceased to be controlling. The authors rather seek contrasts in the character of science projects in colony and metropole, with knowledge sometimes traveling in both directions, or even outside the frame. The military emerges as a player in two of the three papers, and the Pacific War is a major event, not an empty watershed between “pre-” and “post-”. Japanese science is approached in all three accounts more for what it might tell us about colonialism than developmentalism, representing a maturation toward a search for something closer to the texture of the colonial experience. East Asian Science, Technology and Society: an International Journal (2007) 1:205–211 DOI 10.1007/s12280-008-9025-x