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.

Contributors - strong list of internationally diverse authors

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