The Technological Transformation of Japan from the Seventeenth to the Twenty-First Century by Tessa Morris-Suzuki

TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 161 The Technological Transformation ofJapan from the Seventeenth to the Twenty-First Century. By Tessa Morris-Suzuki. Cambridge: Cam­ bridge University Press, 1994. Pp. vii+304; illustrations, figures, tables, notes, bibliography, index. $59.95 (hardcover); $18.95 (paper). This is a book that many in our field imagined should exist but could never be found on any bookshelf—a one-volume history of Japanese technology. For those who have been making do in the classroom with economic and business histories or political science monographs, Morris-Suzuki’s little look on technology will quickly supplant those fatter tomes. Not since Thomas Smith’s very fine col­ lection of essays, Native Sources ofJapanese Industrialization 1750-1920 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), have we been pre­ sented with anything half so useful. The Technological Transformation ofJapan will satisfy the needs of historians, graduate students, and, in some cases, undergraduate students as well. As with any text, the author has had to make important choices about inclusions; most historians of technology will hardly notice the lack ofeconomic development theory in the text or bibliography but will be delighted with the specificity about technical develop­ ment. Unlike many other texts, Morris-Suzuki’s book has a fine his­ toriographical sense, and therein lies one of its strengths. The au­ thor is explicit about the ways her synthesis diverges from the existing literature, and so we are surprised with a text that offers a more complex picture of technological development rather than a more simplified one. The author builds Japan’s story around three important themes: imitation and innovation, the center and the periphery of technical developments, and the social network of innovation. Her insistence on complexity relieves the book from a tedious determination of whether western technology or Japanese innovation is primarily re­ sponsible for Japan’s successful industrialization and, similarly, de­ rails a simple choice between the central state or local institutions as the most important agents of change. By the social network of innovation, Morris-Suzuki means the net­ work of communications that linked research and production cen­ tered inJapanese society. The emphasis here is on institutional struc­ tures and the production of science, a limited approach that may disappoint some readers. However, it provides a natural comple­ ment to the existing literature on the science-technology relation­ ship in western countries. The book includes a helpful chronology and bibliography ofboth English- andJapanese-language sources. The bibliography uses ini­ tials only for the first name of western authors, and while there is no confusion when we see familiar faces reduced to a terse “L. Win­ ner,” for example, entering such sketchy information into a compu­ terized database often produces a chaotic jumble of choices. 162 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE In the last analysis, this fine book will prove invaluable to anyone who studies the history of technology from an international perspec­ tive. Gail A. Cooper Dr. Cooper teaches at Lehigh University. Science and Civilisation in China. Vol. 6, Biology and Biological Technol­ ogy. Pt. 3, Agro-Industries and Forestry. By Christian Daniels and Nicholas K. Menzies, with a foreword byJoseph Needham. Cam­ bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Pp. xxvii+740; illustra­ tions, maps, figures, tables, notes, bibliography, index. $150.00 (hardcover). This volume is the latest of seventeen books in the series edited byjoseph Needham, who died in March 1995 while this volume was in press. We are all indebted to him for opening an entire field of studies on Chinese contributions in science and technology. This volume consists of two independent sections, one on sugar­ cane technology by Christian Daniels and another on forestry by Nicholas K. Menzies. Both are exhaustive scholarly studies on their respective subjects. The first, which takes up more than two-thirds of this volume, is focused upon the sugar industry, although the author also includes very brief discussions on such other agroindustries as oil, paper, in­ digo, lacquer, and tea, each of which might merit fuller treatment as important industrial products based on agriculture. Daniels draws information from a wide range of sources, including agricultural and technological treatises, local gazettes, and reports written by visitors/travelers who witnessed sugar production

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