Building a Modern Japan

In the late Nineteenth-century, the Japanese embarked on a program of westernization in the hope of building a strong and modern nation. Science, technology and medicine played an important part, showing European nations that Japan was a world power worthy of respect. It has been acknowledged that state policy was important in the development of industries but how well-organized was the state and how close were government-business relations? The book seeks to answer these questions and others. The first part deals with the role of science and medicine in creating a healthy nation. The second part of the book is devoted to examining the role of technology, and business-state relations in building a modern nation.

"It seems that a new scholarship is emerging from English-writing scholars of Japanese modernization and industrialization. This book admirably covers different aspects of Japanese modernization, science and technology, gender, health care and traditional technology especially from the viewpoint of cultural and gender studies." - Shigeru Nakayama, Kanagawa University

"A pioneering study in English of how science, medicine, and technology helped to transform Japan in the turbulent years after the Meiji Restoration. Morris Low is to be praised for assembling this excellent collection." - James R. Bartholomew, The Ohio State University"Low is to be commended for assembling a collection of such valueable essays by both leading senioe and junior scholars in Building a Modern Japan. What this collection - together with some of Low's other recently published works - proves is that the history of science of Japan has indeed become a well-established and growning field outside Japan itself." - Walter Grunden, ISIS

Autorentext
MARTHA CHAIKLIN Curator of Asian History at the Milwaukee Public Museum, USA GREGORY CLANCEY is Assistant Professor of History at the National University of Singapore, Singapore W. MILES FLETCHER Professor of History at the University of North Carolina, USA SABINE FRÜHSTÜCK Associate Professor of Modern Japanese Cultural Studies at the University of California, USA CHRISTIAN OBERLÄNDER Professor in the Department for Japanese Studies at the University Halle-Wittenberg, Germany SUMIKO OTSUBO Assistant Professor in the Department of History, Metropolitan State University in Minnesota, USA ROBERT PERRINS Associate Professor in the Department of History and Classics, at Acadia University, Canada YUKI TERAZAWA Teaches at Hofstra University in New York, USA DAVID WITTNER Associate Professor in the Department of History at Utica College, New York, USA

Inhalt
Science, Medicine and a Healthy Nation The Rise of Scientific Medicine in Japan: The Quest for Special Causes, Hospital Medicine, and the Introduction of the Laboratory; C.Oberlander Male Anxieties: Nerve Force, Nation, and the Power of Sexual Knowledge; S.Fruhstuck The Female Body and Eugenic Thought in Meiji Japan; S.Otsubo The Racialising of Bodies through Science in Meiji Japan: The Rise of Race-based Research in Gynaecology; Y.Terazawa Building a Strong and Healthy Empire: Colonial Medicine in Taiwan; S.Liu Doctors, Disease and Development: Engineering Colonial Public Health in Southern Manchurua, 1905-1926; R.J.Perrins Technology, Industry and Nation The Mechanization of Japan's Silk Industry and the Quest for Progress and Civilization, 1870-1880; D.G.Wittner A Miracle of Industry: The Struggle to Produce Sheet Glass in Modernizing Japan; M.Chaiklin The Modernity of Carpenters: Daiku Technique and Meiji Technocracy; G.Clancey Government and Business Relations: The Amalgomation of the Iron and Steel Industry, 1916-1934; P.von Staden The Impact of the Great Depression: The Japan Spinners Association, 1927-1936; W.M.Fletcher