Science for the Empire: Scientific Nationalism in Modern Japan

Yuiken leader Tosaka’s charting of three political currents in mid-1930s Japan: liberalism, Marxism, and Japanism (Nihon shugi), which Tosaka defined as the Japanese version of fascism.

Japan stationed the Kwangtung garrison in south Manchuria in 1905 (reorganized in 1919 as the Kwangtung Army) and established the semipublic company, the South Manchurian Railway (minami Manshū tetsudō gaisha; hereafter Mantetsu), in 1906 to control the area.

It was a complicated process. Recollecting his own and other intellectuals’ experiences during wartime, prominent historian Takeuchi Yoshimi wrote that “[s]ubjectively speaking, it would make more sense to most intellectuals to say that, while continuing to reject and hate the mythology, we became incorporated into the mythology in a doubly and tri

impossible to separate technocrats’ technological patriotism and their status politics.

The word creation (sōsaku) quickly became the key word in the technocratic discourse of Manchuria (and of the empire later).

To create a larger budget, the government declared that a “quasi-wartime economic system”

science unique to Japan. What exactly was meant by “Japanese” technology?

As the next section demonstrates, the war with China brought the much-needed momentum to the technocratic movement.

fifty-five hundred members. See Ōyodo, Miyamoto, 268.