Technology of Empire by Daqing Yang is a thoroughly researched history of Japanese telecommunications, administration, technology, and imperialism from the Meiji period through World War II. In fact, it constitutes a history of the Japanese empire from the standpoint of telecommunications. It will certainly be a standard work on the subject in English. It also contributes to the history of telecommunications in general. Finally, Technology of Empire contributes to the international history of the connections between technology and imperialism, as developed by writers such as Daniel Headrick. Yang suggests, for example, that Japanese technical advances not only provided the means of conquering and attempting to administer a truly enormous imperial space between 1931 and 1945; the realities and perceptions of these advances also contributed to creating and energizing Japanese motives to do so (p. 6).

As Yang recounts, Fukuzawa Yukichi had recognized as early as 1875 that the telegraph system served as “the nerve system of a country” (p. 15). The questions of who would control and administer this system, and to what ends, were thus central to the constitution of the national states and empires. The lessons drawn by the communications bureaucrat Matsumae Shigeyoshi (1901–1991) after a tour of Southeast Asia in 1937 suggests what was at stake: the Dutch, British, and French had very consciously established a “nerve system connecting the colonies and their home countries.” Britain particularly held a hegemonic position. Its empire was held together by “a communications network that crisscrosses the earth like a spider's web.” This worldwide web “completely controls world opinion” and was “a powerful weapon in trade and other international business warfare” (pp. 197–98). Matsumae's wartime vision of centralized control followed from this: “Electricity travels at the same speed as light. Clearly, … something that transmits at such a high speed must be handled as a single entity. As the most important issue for the construction of Greater East Asia at the hands of Japan, it is a matter of course that [all telecommunications companies] must be absorbed into the nerve system of Japan” (p. 315).

Matsumae is the individual treated most prominently here. (His peaceful and progressive postwar career was also important, and would bear further study.) Communications bureaucrats Kajii Takeshi and Okumura Kiwao also have major roles. The Ministry of Communications (MOC) itself figures very prominently, as does the Manchurian Telegraph and Telephone Company and several other governmental or parastatal agencies. The book begins with an account of the development of telecommunications during the Meiji era, but its core focus is on the period from the 1920s through the 1940s, including an account of telecommunications imperialism in North China in the 1930s and a detailed survey of the takeover and operation of telecommunications systems in occupied China and Southeast Asia. Along the way, there is much detail about technology and technological nationalism. To offer one example, there are fascinating sidelights on the early history of facsimile technology in East Asia, where the complexities of regional script systems made it especially desirable (pp. 260–61). There is also much detail on the nature of the wartime state.

Yang's focus on Japanese “techno-imperialism,” as he describes it, complements the use of the same term by other historians of Japanese empire and technology (Yang names Yoshihisa Tak Matsusaka's important study of the South Manchurian Railway Company and David Wittner's of Meiji-era technological development). Yang's work also complements the work of Richard Samuels on Japanese “techno-nationalism” (“Rich Nation Strong Army”: National Security and the Technological Transformation of Japan, Cornell University Press, 1994). It is still closer to the recent work of Janis Mimura on “techno-fascism” (Planning for Empire: Reform Bureaucrats and the Japanese Wartime State, Cornell University Press, 2011). Indeed, given this abundance of thorough and careful studies, the stage seems set for some new syntheses. Yang does not enter directly into the debates over technocracy as Mimura does, yet many points that he develops concerning the development of a “technology bureaucracy” of engineer-bureaucrats centered on the Ministry of Communications could be considered in this connection (see, e.g., p. 154 on the “Technicians Movement”). One particular link is made by the bureaucrat-ideologist Okumura Kiwao, who has an important place in both Yang's and Mimura's studies. Altogether, there is a lot here. Technology of Empire is a big piece of work and will stand as a foundational study of its subject.