Aaron Stephen Moore. Constructing East Asia

Historians interested in how science and technology shaped Japan and its wartime empire have been rewarded with a handful of excellent studies published over the past five years by Yang Daqing, Janis Mimura, and Mizuno Hiromi. Aaron Stephen Moore's book adds to this illustrious canon. Moore argues that technology was “much more than simply advanced machinery and infrastructure” (p. 6). Rather, “it included a subjective, ethical, and visionary dimension” (p. 6) and “constituted a widespread force of rationalization” (p. 5). Moore documents how technology—described by his oft-employed phrase “technological imaginary”—operated as an ideology for wartime mobilization and colonial rule. Though his study suffers from a few afflictions common to many first books, Constructing East Asia challenges us to see Japanese technocrats, their professional aims, their continental objectives, and the realities of their undertakings in Northeast Asia in new, sometimes rational, ways. Moore begins and ends his study in Japan. He focuses his attention first on how leftist intellectuals such as Aikawa Haruki theorized technology's meaning in interwar and wartime Japan. Drawing extensively from the writings of Aikawa, Moore documents how and why Aikawa “abandoned class as the primary lens to analyze and organize society in favor of an idea of society as a complex mechanism of actively mobilized subjects and institutions that revolutionized all areas of life” (p. 25). He implies that scholars who have embraced the tenkō explanation—ideological reversal as a result of coercive state pressure—have oversimplified things to a considerable degree. While this section is very dense, Moore succeeds in documenting that “objectives of Japan's wartime fascists and communists like Aikawa were indeed reconcilable and at times mutually complicit, especially within the discourse of the technological imaginary” (p. 62). So why worry about the use of labels such as “fascists” and “fascism” to describe wartime Japan, particularly when Moore uses such a big-tent definition of the f-word? He defines fascism with one big brushstroke “as an ideology and mode of power translated globally into various national contexts that combined antimodern and modern elements for the revolutionary transformation and mobilization of society” (p. 8). This is too broad and simplistic to be meaningful, especially since Moore's scholarship illustrates how such tired labels need reconceptualizing or, better yet, abandonment.

Colonialism · Empire · Ideology · Media studies · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Technocracy · Chinese history and philosophy · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History · History of Science and Medicine · Law