Institutionally and intellectually, science and technology studies in Japan has developed at an arm’s length from anthropologies of science and technology, with stronger ties to STS in its traditional Euro-American centers than with anthropology within Japan. At the same time, there have been moments of significant crossover and exchange, both academic—particularly the 2010 4S meeting in Tokyo—and beyond, namely the triple disasters of March 11, 2011 (see 3.11 AND THE STS-ANTHROPOLOGY OF DISASTER).
Cite as: Otsuki, Grant Jun. 2018. “STS in Japan.” In Anthropologies of Science and Technology in Japan, created by Yoko Taguchi, Miki Namba, Grant Jun Otsuki, Gergely Mohacsi, Shuhei Kimura, and Miho Ishii. In STS Across Borders Digital Exhibit, curated by Aalok Khandekar and Kim Fortun. Society for Social Studies of Science. August.
Many of the recent origins of STS in Japan are described in a series of articles published in East Asian Science, Technology and Society in 2009 and 2010, which were organized by Togo Tsukahara in advance of the 2010 4S meeting in Tokyo. Tsukahara writes that STS in Japan has grown “out of the ivory tower of History and Philosophy of Science (HPS) and the Sociology of Science.” (2009, 505), much as it has in the US and Western Europe. This can be taken in two senses. First, as Gregory Clancey argues in the same series, the institutionalization of STS as a discipline in Japan was spurred significantly by the enthusiasm for the field among high ranking universities in the West (2009, 527) and took place in conversation with central figures in the field in the West. For instance, the establishment of the Japanese Society for Science and Technology and the inaugural issue of its journal Kagaku Gijutsu Shakai-ron Kenkyū were met with congratulatory messages from then 4S president Wiebe Bijker, and EASST president Sally Wyatt.
Tsukahara’s statement also gestures towards the historical, philosophical, and social conditions in which “science” and “technology” themselves became matters of concern in Japan. These are exemplified by the key questions facing Japanese intellectuals and state builders during the earliest period of Japan’s intellectual and industrial development during the 19thand early 20thcenturies. As historian Hiromi Mizuno writes, the modernity of Imperial Japan (1868-1945) was characterized by an “uneasiness surrounding the topic of science” (2009, 2). Modern science arrived in Japan as Western science, but it “gained legitimacy and authority on account of its supposed universality” (2). According to Mizuno, “science” was the center of contentious debates among those he identifies as technocrats and Marxists in the pre-World War II period. Technocrats (gijutsu kanryō) were primarily concerned with science and technology as centrally-managed means to facilitate resource exploitation in Asia (2009, 7). Marxists, on the other hand, espoused a universalistic vision of science that saw Japan’s science at the time as being in a “deformed” state prior to the realization of a truly universal, proletarian science (2009, 7). Among these intellectuals were pioneers in the history and philosophy of science and technology in Japan, including Jun Tosaka, Kinnosuke Ogura (the first post-war president of the History of Science Society of Japan), and Hiroto Saigusa (Ogura’s immediate successor as president.)
Following World War II, the US Occupation authorities dismantled much of the technological and scientific infrastructure of Japan, but intersecting binaries of “Japan-West,” “Science/Technology-Nation/Culture,” and “Modernity-Tradition” continued to configure Japanese society and politics during the era of reconstruction and economic growth: Could Japan be “modern” without being “Western”? Is a “Japanese” science or technology possible? These were further inflected by questions about how science and technology could serve the aims of “democracy” variously defined, and prevent a regression to totalitarianism (see Mizuno 2009; Morris-Suzuki 1994; Nakayama 1991).
Togo Tsukahara and his fellow authors overview the state of STS in Japan in a series of articles published in 2009 and 2010 in East Asian Science, Technology, and Society.
While the earth sciences have been a major topic for STS in Japan, few STS scholars have focused on natural disasters. Social studies of disaster (environmental sociology, the sociology and social psychology of natural disaster, the anthropology of natural disaster...Read more
