Togo Tsukahara

Pre-1872 Extension of the Japanese Instrumental Meteorological Observation Series back to 1819

Instrumental observations from Dejima (Nagasaki), Japan, taken under the responsibility of the Dutch, covering the periods 1819-28, 1845-58, and 1871-78, have been recovered. The Dejima series overlaps by six months the modern Nagasaki Observatory series, which covers 1878-present. The recovered data extend the start of the instrumental Japanese series back from 1872 to 1819, leaving major gaps during 1829-44 and 1859-71.

STS Implications of Japan's 3/11 Crisis

On 11 March 2011, a mega-earthquake (magnitude 9.0) hit the northeastern coast of Japan, followed by tsunamis of historic scale and a series of nuclear power plant accidents. More than fourteen thousand people reportedly died, and thirteen thousand people remain missing as of 24 April 2011. Almost a half million people became homeless—mostly due to the earthquake and tsunami and the proximity of homes to atomic power plants. The unstoppable sweep of unleashed nature rendered humans desperate and stripped them of all hubris. The events of 3/11 devastated Japan’s artifice in one fell swoop. This triple calamity represents a first in Japan’s modern history, with the exception ofwartime disasters.What strikes us is not only the number of people suffering and the geographical extension of the area devastated but also the sequential nature of the disasters. Experts believe the malignant megascale seismic activity caused the killer tsunami, and both of them at their highestmagnitude and height eventually induced the world’s worst nuclear crisis since Chernobyl. The structure of this disaster is so complicated that we cannot yet single out the individual causalities with any precision. Geoscientists have identified three epicenters of the quake and upgraded its magnitude from 8.8 to 9.0, and the effects of the nuclear disaster (damage to reactors and total amount of radioactive substance leaked, for instance) is not yet clearly known. Scientists will further detail these respective disastrous events. We do, however, already know one thing quite definitely: the repercussions of this triple disaster have not yet ended. Japan still reverberates from heavy aftershocks, and those may be accompanied by additional tsunamis. Moreover, none of us can completely deny the possibility of another megaquake in any adjacent re-

Making STS Socially Responsible: Reflections on Japanese STS

It’s terribly sad to have to announce that a leading historian of Japanese technology, Hitoshi Yoshioka 吉岡斉, passed away on 14 January 2018 at the age of sixty-four. Yoshioka is probably best known for his contribution as an editor and author, together with Shigeru Nakayama and Kunio Gotō, of the voluminous and definitive Japanese Contemporary History of Science and Technology series.1 English speakers too will know him as a coauthor of English-language works on Japanese technology, along with Nakayama and Morris Low (Low, Nakayama, and Yoshioka 1999). Within the history of Japanese technology, he worked especially on nuclear engineering, and his Social History of Japanese Nuclear Engineering is the gold standard in the field. Yoshioka was highly critical of nuclear energy and of Japan’s nuclear policy, but he did not hesitate to take up various official positions and accepted membership in the National Commission for Nuclear Energy. Within the influential governmental advisory committee, he tried to take a firm hold on the reins of policy makers and the nuclear industry, self-defining as a “counter-technocrat”2 whose function was apparently to change nuclear policy from the inside. After the triple disaster of 3/11 in 2011, Yoshioka became more involved in the citizen’s movement on nuclear energy, finally becoming a representative of the Citizens’ Commission on Nuclear Energy (CCNE), a nonprofit advocacy, and chairing the summary of a revised policy advocacy paper in 2017 (Citizens’ Commission on Nuclear Energy 2017). Regretfully, his commitment to the CCNE ended suddenly, and this became one of his last pieces of work. What can those of us engaged in Japanese STS learn from Yoshioka; what are his lessons for Japanese STS? He was an excellent historian of contemporary technology, at the same time extending his analysis using the sociology of technoscience, and he was the most influential critic of Japan’s nuclear policy. Toward the end of his life he became more engaged in the citizens’movement, facing as it then did the deadlock of

Techno-Science and the State in the Japanese Empire: Yang Daqing, Technology of Empire Janis Mimura, Planning for Empire

It is a pleasant surprise to find two serious English-language scholarly works on Japan’s period of empire-building and the Japanese state’s use, appropriation, and management of technology. Together, these works suggest that the Japanese attempt at expansion and empire-building in the twentieth century and the conceptualization of its claim to the “Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere” should be characterized by its application of techno-science and not simply attributed to nationalism and fascism. The Japanese political management of a combined science and technology was in many senses remarkable, and it holds great interest as the first nonWestern case of the appropriation and globalization of modern Western science and technology. Yet it has been underexamined; except for a few English-language works, such as Mizuno Hiromi’s Science for the Empire: Scientific Nationalism in Modern Japan (2009), most studies of techno-science and empire in Japan have been limited to Japanese academia or to Chinese, mainly from Liang Bo and his group. Yang Daqing’s Technology of Empire: Telecommunications and Japanese Expansion in Asia, 1883–1945 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Asia Center, Harvard East Asian Monograph 219, 2011. Pp. 468.

Recovery of nineteenth-century Tokyo/Osaka meteorological data in Japan

49.95) is a straightforward history of telecommunications in Japan: well-documented, descriptive, and thorough. This is an impressive work, starting from Japan’s first contact with Western communications technology on the occasion of its forced encounter with American gunboat diplomacy, and ending with