On Walter E. Grunden’s Secret Weapons and World War II: Japan in the Shadow of Big Science

Abstract

The Asia-Pacific War caused by Imperial Japan in the first half of the twentieth century is an important topic for the East Asian STS studies. It was an event which vastly changed the interrelationships among science, technology, and society in Japan and the other East Asian countries and areas. And it also affected the postwar developments in these countries and areas in various ways. We cannot fully understand the present STS issues in East Asia without knowing the changing STS interrelationships in the war, but studies on this topic are still in the rudimentary stage. In Japan since the 1980s the historical studies on wartime science and technology in Japan and its former colonies have been progressing and, in recent years, transnational cooperation with European and Asian scholars has begun, good examples of which are the contributions of Japanese scholars to the publication of this international STS journal. However, the English-language literature on Japan’s wartime science and technology was very scarce, probably because of linguistic barriers on both the Japanese and non-Japanese sides. Grunden’s Secret Weapons and World War II is the first English-language book on this topic and is extensively based on numerous Japanese as well as English-language sources available at present. Walter E. Grunden, associate professor of history at Bowling Green State University, Ohio, USA, studied modern Japanese history, modern Chinese history, and the history of science during his graduate school days at the Ohio State University and the University of California, Santa Barbara. He wrote his Ph.D. thesis in 1998 entitled “Science under the Rising Sun: Weapons Development and the Organization of Scientific Research in World War II Japan.” Secret Weapons and World War II is a revised and enlarged version of his Ph.D. thesis, especially East Asian Science, Technology and Society: an International Journal (2007) 1:251–254 DOI 10.1007/s12280-007-9015-4