CHAPTER 1

Revolutionary Technologies of Life

The Intellectual Appropriation of Technology

In his 1941 book Ideas on Technology, the philosopher of science SaigusaHiroto observed that the term "technology" (gijutsu) had becomeprominent in Japan's public discourse only from the mid-1930s as the statebegan to mobilize engineers, technicians, and skilled workers for the "constructionof Asia." "Today, a new world is being made," he emphasized,and "it is only natural for technical people to be sought after as new thingsare being made in industry, economics, politics and even in ideology, literature,and the arts." In this wartime context of political, economic, andcultural "construction," technology was associated more with creationand production in general rather than solely with physical machinery andartifacts. The enormous literature on technology in the public sphere andthe predominance of such terms as "technological spirit," "technologicalculture," "technological science," and "technological mobilization" attestedto the emergence of a distinct technological imaginary as well as the contestednature of the term in wartime Japanese society.

Throughout Japan's 1930s and 1940s, debates over the meaning oftechnology raged across the political spectrum, particularly among bureaucrats,intellectuals, and engineers. On the one hand, far right-wingideologues and politicians pushing for a Showa Restoration viewed technologyas something that was steadily eroding Japan's spiritual vigor, aswell as traditional emperor-centered values of community and agrarianism,or tried to formulate a unique "Japanese Science and Technology."On the other hand, many engineers, bureaucrats, and businessmen viewedtechnology's spread throughout all areas of life as a key to resolving worseningsocial ills, and they campaigned vigorously for the introduction ofrational techniques of management and administration throughout society.Along with "culture" (bunka) and "nation" (minzoku), "technology"was an important lens through which Japanese elites defined Japan's modernityduring a period of total war and empire. An important characteristicof this discourse was that for many, technology was not just acceptedas the "value-neutral" machines and productive mechanisms of society,but rather, technology's very nature was questioned and redefined. In fact,technology was more and more equated with the production of all of society,not only of its laws, institutions, ideologies, social organization, andeconomic structure but of its citizens and subjects as well. As Victor Koschmannpoints out, it was interpreted more and more "in performative orexistential terms, as signifying certain ways of thinking, acting, or being,or even as representing certain qualitative virtues, such as rationality, creativity,or an ethic of responsibility." In sum, technology became a signifierthrough which Japanese intellectuals worked out solutions to some ofthe pressing problems of capitalist modernity, such as social inequality,spiritual alienation, and the structure and future shape of Japan's economy.

Although Marxist and leftist intellectuals became largely peripheralfigures during the war because of increased state repression, their role inshaping the social scientific discourse behind state policy has been widelyrecognized. They were the first to introduce the main issues regardingtechnology's meaning and role in modern capitalist society to a widerange of academics, engineers, bureaucrats, and the general reading public.They launched the "Debate over the Theory of Technology" (1932–35),which centered on whether technology was primarily "objective" as opposedto "subjective." Did technology primarily consist of instrumentaltools, machinery, and infrastructure, they asked, or did it also significantlyinvolve subjective will, imagination, and ethics? The debate introducedpeople to the subjective, creative aspects of technology and madeparallels between technology and other processes of "making" in therealms of politics, education, and the arts. At stake for Marxist and leftistintellectuals, however, was the relationship between technology and socialtransformation—how could technology become truly integrated intopeople's lives as a force for revolutionary change and human developmentinstead of existing as an external force of spiritual alienation, unemployment,and exploitation under modern capitalism? The Soviet Union's "socialistconstruction" campaigns to empower the proletariat through technicaleducation and the promotion of science and technology in everydaylife offered a beacon of hope to Japanese Marxists and prompted them toexamine this question in terms of Japan's particular capitalist conditions.

This chapter examines the technological imaginary among Japaneseleftists, primarily through the work of Aikawa Haruki (Yanami Hisao), aleading theorist of technology during the war. Although it is more understandablefor bureaucrats and engineers to have supported and articulateda view of technology as representing values of productivity, rationality,and creativity given the wartime requirements of mobilization and Japan'savowed mission to "construct East Asia," it is less clear why leftists criticalof the state developed similar ideas. In fact, before his arrest in 1937, Aikawastuck to a strictly materialist definition of technology as the physicalsystem of the means of production and analyzed its role in exacerbating thecontradictions of Japan's "semifeudal" capitalism. His primary goal backthen was to understand technology and capitalist reproduction in the interestsof "liberating" the means of production from capitalist control,which had transformed technology into a force for alienation and exploitation.Why did such Marxists as Aikawa abandon their more limited,materialistic view of technology as the capitalist means of production infavor of a broader idea of technology as the economic, social, and culturalprocesses (i.e., technologies) that organized and produced all aspects oflife? What was the allure of this type of thinking among leftists such thatthey even began articulating similar ideas put forth by wartime bureaucratsand engineers of transforming society into a type of rationalized,productive social mechanism that involved the willful, active participationof all of its members? Answering this question helps us understandthe powerful appeal of the technological imaginary and the values associatedwith it, which continued to grow in strength during Japan's postwarhigh-speed economic growth era.

These questions gained particular importance in the immediatepostwar era when newly empowered leftist intellectuals debated the natureof "free and democratic" subjectivity in response to what they perceivedas an "immature" or "irrational" subjectivity that they argued wasresponsible for Japan's descent into totalitarianism and war. In the realmof theory of technology, the physicist Taketani Mitsuo and his followersput forth the well-known definition of technology as the "consciousapplication of rule-governedness in human (productive) praxis" in responseto what they saw as "fascist" wartime theories of technology thatemphasized blind subservience to values of productivity. Taketani's theory,which carved out an autonomous space for human subjectivity andpraxis, seemed relevant to the democratic struggles taking place amongscientists in Japan's laboratories and universities, and more broadly, to Japan'srapid technological transformation in the late 1950s and 1960s. Accordingto Taketani, the rise of a spirit of independent and rational scientificinquiry among engineers and the general populace would bring aboutthe advancement of the productive forces, which would ultimately conflictwith the outmoded, irrational relations of production, resulting inincreased class struggle and ultimately socialist revolution. Yet as Koschmannnotes, such a conception of technology as fundamentally rationalwould not necessarily prevent the opposite effect, namely, the advancingproductive relations becoming the basis for the increasing technical rationalizationand systematization of society and thereby the incorporation ofclass and social conflict. By dismissing the war merely as a period of irrationality,atavism, and spiritualism, postwar leftist intellectuals missedsome of the specific ways that technology could be used to mobilize "freeand democratic" subjectivity, and instead celebrated what they saw as adistinctly "rational" postwar technological development.

As discussed in the book's introduction, the emerging discourse ontechnology during the war among bureaucrats, engineers, and intellectualsmust be understood as part of a larger process of change in how poweroperated and was articulated in modern Japan rather than simply as a toolof an irrational totalitarian regime. As Yamanouchi Yasushi argues, duringthis period of intense social, political, and cultural mobilization fortotal war beginning in 1937, the nature of power shifted from being somethingwielded repressively from above to being resituated and systematizedinto various institutions and people within society. Borrowing a termfrom Talcott Parsons, Yamanouchi argues that Japan shifted from being aclass society of clearly defined realms of state and society to more of a"system society," like many other modern societies at the time. Class andother types of social conflict were continuously subject to technical rulesand institutionalized as part of an idealized social mechanism. Politicsbecame more about resolving technical problems and mobilizing subjectsfor state goals than posing alternative, conflicting visions of society. Moreimportant, this emerging wartime "system society" continued in variousforms—for example, in the system of institutions that co-opted the strongpublic sympathy for the antinuclear movement into support for nuclearpower—during the postwar period of high-speed economic growth.

In line with contemporary trends in Europe and the United States,Japanese bureaucrats, technical experts, and intellectuals from across thepolitical spectrum played an important role in conceiving a systematizedJapan during the 1930s and 1940s, specifically by extending the meaningof technology to include the production of all aspects of life. Leftistsplayed an especially active role in shaping the technological imaginary primarilybecause they had already developed a large body of research dedicatedto a systematic understanding of the Japanese economy and thereforeeasily adapted their methodology to other realms of society. Duringthe war, Marxist intellectuals, such as Aikawa, abandoned class as theprimary lens to analyze and organize society in favor of an idea of societyas a complex mechanism of actively mobilized subjects and institutionsthat revolutionized all areas of life. In this way, they began sharing a beliefwith government technocrats in the transformative power of state planningcombined with corporatist mass mobilization. In the same mannerthat technocratic thinking was easily incorporated into different nationalregimes and ideologies around the world, Japanese Marxists articulated anotion of a technologized wart ime system society to achieve their ownspecific objectives of socialist modernization and revolution. But in theend, their critical vision of a systematized society rooted in the energies ofthe people lent itself to the state's technological imaginary of creating amore efficient social machine for wartime mobilization and empire.

Examining Aikawa's voluminous and diverse body of work on technologyprovides insight into the extent to which Marxist intellectuals envisioneda modern "system society" and how it might operate. His visionof a fully technologized society challenges the popular image of wartimeJapan as primarily rooted in authoritarian violence, spiritualist ultranationalism,and a pervasive atavism. More important, it reveals some of therational techniques of power and mobilization taking shape at the time inthe form of the technological imaginary, which postwar leftist intellectualsoverlooked within their simplistic narratives of the wartime period as"irrational" and their self-promotion as the leaders of a movement for amore rational, democratic, and prosperous Japan. Whereas wartimeMarxists possessed a naive belief in the technical systematization of society,many postwar Marxists largely ignored the issue and claimed thattechnology could be controlled through the development of a strong "rationalsubjectivity" rooted in humanism and democracy. An analysis ofAikawa's notions of the technicized society, the "technological economy"in Asia, and "cultural technologies" reveals how such a free and rationalsubjectivity could also be mobilized for the pursuit of war, empire, andother state objectives that undermined the development of a democraticcivil society.

The Origins of Theory of Technology

Japanese intellectuals were well aware of the debates on the nature oftechnology occurring in Europe and the United States in the early twentiethcentury. With the spread of the machine throughout all areas of lifeand the construction of large and complex technological systems in thelate nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, intellectuals throughout theindustrialized world began to grapple with the meaning of technologyand technological development. Unlike in the nineteenth century, whenthe discourse was largely characterized by a romantic rejection or an enthusiasticwelcoming of specific technological artifacts, the early twentieth-centurydebate centered on the larger project of technological developmentitself and the nature of life within a world saturated by technology.In Germany, for example, such intellectuals as Oswald Spengler, WernerSombart, and Max Weber and such businessmen as Walter Rathenau attemptedto "assimilate" modern technology into more familiar discoursesof German Kultur or state economic planning (Planwirtschaft) in order tocome to terms with some of technology's harmful effects, such as devastatingwarfare, massive unemployment, and spiritual alienation. Inthe United States and Europe, Taylorist ideas of technical rationality in thefactory lent themselves to utopian visions of overcoming class conflict byreorganizing society along the lines of a coherent system of efficiency, optimality,and productivity. This manifested itself in various forms throughoutthe world, such as the technocracy movement in the United States, St.Simonianism in France, Stakhanovism in the Soviet Union, and futurismin Italy—all of which proposed differing versions of an optimal socialmechanism managed by experts and run by highly skilled, creative workersdedicated to overcoming class conflict and social inequality. In sum,with technology's rapid proliferation and development throughout all areasof life, commentators began to formulate new concepts to capture thatexperience of social transformation in accordance with their specific historicalor cultural context. By actively "appropriating" technology, intellectualsincorporated it into wider "discourses of modernity," thereby shapingthe modernization process itself. Technology was no longer new ornovel, nor was it something that could simply be isolated or romanticallyrejected as in the nineteenth century.

In fact, in the United States—widely viewed as the pinnacle ofmodern technological civilization in the early twentieth century—t heterm "technology" was not even widely used as a general term for artifacts,machines, and technical systems until after World War I or perhapsnot even until the Great Depression, according to Leo Marx and EricSchatzberg. Other terms, such as "useful arts," "manufacturing," "industry,""invention," "applied science," and "machine," were used instead todescribe what is now generally subsumed under "technology." As Germanyrapidly industrialized in the late nineteenth century, a sophisticated discourseon Technik arose among engineers; however, it only developed intoa wider debate in the early twentieth century, when engineers and intellectualsattempted to define the relationship between Technik and Kulturand understand the relationship among Technik, Wirtschaft (economy),and Kultur. Thus, the term "technology" not only was more widely usedin the early twentieth century but also began to be defined more broadlyand in less material or artifactual terms. This coincided with the proliferationof large and complex technological systems throughout the industrializedworld, which blurred the boundaries between the artifactual andother components, such as the "conceptual, institutional, and human."In this context, intellectuals began to define "technology" in more subjectiveor metaphysical terms and to expand its realm into the fields of economics,administration, social policy, and culture.