On Morris Low’s Building a Modern Japan: Science, Technology, and Medicine in the Meiji Era and Beyond

Abstract

Ever since Joseph Needham published the first volume of Science and Civilisation in China in 1954, many important works have been produced on East Asian science, technology, and medicine in the pre-modern period. The history of science, technology, and medicine in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, however, has been largely neglected. It began to attract some attention only recently with the rapid economic growth in the region. Morris Low’s edited volume of Osiris (Volume 13, 1998), with the title of Beyond Joseph Needham: Science, Technology, and Medicine in East and Southeast Asia, was a notable example of the new direction of the field: eleven out of twelve case-studies were about the nineteenth and twentieth century; and five of them were on Japanese science, technology, and medicine. Low has done a marvelous editorial job once again in his new book, Building a Modern Japan: Science, Technology, and Medicine in the Meiji Era and Beyond, which is a very valuable addition to this rapidly growing field. The Meiji era (1868–1912), which is the focus of Building a Modern Japan, was the most glorious and also most turbulent time in Japanese history. As Low states in the introduction, the Meiji Restoration “ushered in a program of modernization that involved not just opening Japan to trade with the West but participating in a global system of knowledge—‘foreign intercourse’ in the broadest sense of the term” (p. 2). During this period, Japan enthusiastically adopted Western-style systems of politics, economics, education, science, technology and medicine, and transformed itself into a modern, industrialized nation. Japanese industry began to dominate trade in East and Southeast Asian markets. The Japanese military defeated the Chinese army and navy in 1894–1895, and also vanquished Russian forces on land and at sea in 1904– 1905. Japanese science, technology, and medicine left a long-lasting influence on China, Korea and Taiwan. Japan indeed became the model for other Asian countries who were desperately trying to modernize themselves. This unique success of Meiji Japan attracted the interest of Western scholarship including history of science, East Asian Science, Technology and Society: an International Journal (2007) 1:255–258 DOI 10.1007/s12280-007-9016-3