Aaron S. Moore, “Constructing East Asia: Technology, Ideology, and Empire in Japan’s Wartime Era, 1931-1945” (Stanford UP, 2013)

New Books in Technology · Oct 26, 2013 · 1h 10m

We tend to understand the modernization of Japan as a story of its rise as a techno-superpower. In East Asia: Technology, Ideology, and Empire in Japan’s Wartime Era, 1931-1945 (Stanford University Press, 2013), Aaron Stephen Moore critiques this account in a study of the relationship between technology and power in the context of Japanese fascism and imperialism. Moore traces the emergence of a “technological imaginary” in wartime Japan, exploring how different groups (including intellectuals, technology bureaucrats, engineers, and state planners) invested the term “technology” with…