Constructing East Asia

the long version

The conventional understanding of Japanese wartime ideology has for years been summed up by just a few words: anti-modern, spiritualist, and irrational. Yet such a cut and dried picture is not at all reflective of the principles that guided national policy from 1931-1945. Challenging the status quo, 'Constructing East Asia' examines how Japanese intellectuals, bureaucrats, and engineers used technology as a system of power and mobilisation - what the author terms a 'technological imaginary' - to rally people in Japan and its expanding empire.