Hiromi Mizuno, Science for the Empire: Scientific Nationalism in Modern Japan. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009, 288 pp.

摘要

This is an ambitious book that connects a lot of dots. Professor Hiromi Mizuno,na historian at the University of Minnesota, marshals a diverse and cross-ndisciplinary treasure-trove of Japanese-language sources, from scholarlynposition papers to science fiction and children’s magazines, in creating a frame-nwork for the study of the pursuit of science in Japan in the twinned contexts ofnnationalism and empire-building. Eschewing a linear focus on “official stories”nor on conventional readings of both policy-makers and famous litterateursnalike, Mizuno boldly navigates through an illuminating array of sources,nhitherto more or less overlooked or un(der)acknowledged in both the Japanesenand Anglophone literature on imperial Japan, in demonstrating the “ideal ofnscience-technology” (a hybrid formation) during the modern war yearsn(roughly 1920–1945) and the continuity of that (often disturbingly compro-nmised) ideal with very little alteration during the postwar period. Her conclud-ning chapter is a critical tour-de-force, if condensed, presentation of thenessentially seamless continuity of a “Japanist discourse” of science and its dia-nlectical corollary, “nature,” ever since the ascendance of “technocracy” over ancentury ago.