Mobilizing for war, engineering the peace: The state, the shop floor, and the engineer in Japan, 1935--1960.

摘要

For the Japanese—as for all the peoples of the industrialized world—World War Two was and remains the singular event on which their histories of the twentieth century pivot. For both wartime mobilization and postwar revival, engineers positioned technology as the means to transform industry and society both economically and politically.; This dissertation examines what motivated wartime engineers and how those motivations changed in light of the humiliation of defeat, of widespread postwar labor unrest, and of both the general democratic reform of Japanese society and the specific reforms of engineering implemented by the American occupation government. Broadly, it is organized as four interrelated histories of industrial control technology. These technologies are production technology, instrumentation, quality control, and automatic control. Each history traces the consequences of first national mobilization for war and then of democratic reform in peace on the material and institutional organization of the technology, its uses, and its engineers. How well a technology adapted to the material, political, and economic circumstances of the industrial workshop in a large part determined its relative success. Taken together, these histories track a shift in the expectations, meanings, and goals that Japanese engineers placed on their work.; Between the end of the war and the end of occupation, the ideological framework within which engineers worked shifted from the realm of the political to that of the economic. No longer supported by the ambitions of an authoritarian state and simultaneously prodded by occupation bureaucrats intent on democratic reform, Japanese engineers looked to industry for legitimation of their work. The characteristics of this reformed and democratized engineering depended on the material organization of its technology, the skills that it demanded, the institutions that supported it, and the histories and politics constraining these institutions. Although the engineers using such technologies marked themselves as reforming and reformed and presented the possibility of certain kinds of reconciliation between labor and management within the factory, at the same time, such ideologies could (and did) generate contradiction and fragmentation elsewhere in Japanese society. In particular, for academics engineering would never be quite the same.