Science for the Empire Scientific Nationalism in Modern Japan [Hardcover]

This fascinating study examines the discourse of science in Japan from the 1920s to the 1940s in relation to nationalism and imperialism. How did Japan, with Shinto creation mythology at the absolute core of its national identity, come to promote the advancement of science and technology? Using what logic did wartime Japanese embrace both the rationality that denied and the nationalism that promoted this mythology?Focusing on three groups of science promoterstechnocrats, Marxists, and popular science proponentsthis work demonstrates how each group made sense of apparent contradictions by articulating its politics through different definitions of science and visions of a scientific Japan. The contested, complex political endeavor of talking about and promoting science produced what the author calls scientific nationalism, a powerful current of nationalism that has been overlooked by scholars of Japan, nationalism, and modernity. The book's discourse analysis approach works wellit effectively reveals how discourses about science and the scientific was bound up with a whole host of other significant ideas. A very important contribution to Japanese intellectual and social history. Mizuno's book will require historians and social scientists of Japan to consider further the importance of the natural sciences, nationalism, and discourses about them for the larger field of study. Mizuno's analysis also informs areas such as the economic and political roles of nuclear development, the direction of computer-related industries, and robotics. . . . In all, it is a modest gem using fresh materials and approaches to get at important issues. An innovative look at Japan's wartime discourse of science and nationalism and how it shaped postwar Japan. Scholars of modern Japan, and any scholars wanting to learn of the role and expectations of science and its relationship to the state, should carefully read this important work. In this fine book, Hiromi Mizuno addresses questilÃÏ