The next meeting of the Japan History Group (JHG) at the Institute of Social Science (ISS), University of Tokyo, will be held on Friday, 31 May 2019, at 6:00 PM in No.1 Meeting Room (Dai-ichi Kaigi-shitsu), 1st floor of the Main Building of ISS, Hongo Campus.



Presenter: Jonathan Andrew Lear (Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of History, University of California, Berkeley; Visiting Researcher at the Institute of Social Science, University of Tokyo; Fulbright Japan Graduate Research Fellow)



Title: "Hashimoto Seinosuke, Takahashi Minoru, and the Present Pasts of Japanese Atomic Power"


Discussant: Takeo Kikkawa (Professor, Tokyo University of Science)




Abstract:

The development of Japan's atomic power program is often seen as emerging from the context of the early Cold War, when conservative Japanese politicians interfaced with the state and business interests of the United States through the Atoms for Peace program. Few would contradict the immense role that US played in supporting Japan's program with knowledge, technology, personnel, and fissile materials, or its role in shaping powerful cultural narratives of atomic power. Even the institutional structures that constituted Japan's atomic power program were rooted in American models (for example, the Atomic Energy Commission).


Yet this narrative fails to address what one might call the "native sources" of Japanese atomic power. As much as the program's roots lay in America, atomic power also emerged as a Japanese response to a lost and now discredited war; as part of the project to reimagine and rebuild a more equitable Japanese economy; and as part of the longer-term discourses on civilization, world time, and "world trends" (jisei). The atomic project also appealed to both national and cosmopolitan interests: it gave a postwar home to those seeking redemption for their wartime misdeeds, while providing a space for those who were more critical of the state's atomic ambitions, but nonetheless interested in the promise of the new and ostensibly universal science of atomic energy.


This presentation will deal with this alternative narrative of atomic power, focusing specifically on the thought of two individuals who devoted their postwar lives to the atomic energy project: Hashimoto Seinosuke (a Taishō-era journalist and political activist, who became a high-ranking Home Ministry bureaucrat during the 1930s, later becoming a key figure in the world of atomic power advocacy) and Takahashi Minoru (a Tōdai electrical engineering graduate, who served in various state laboratories during and after the war, eventually becoming the head of the atomic energy section at CRIEPI, a key postwar energy think tank).


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Dr. Naofumi NAKAMURA
Professor of Business History
Institute of Social Science,
The University of Tokyo
naofumin@iss.u-tokyo.ac.jp <mailto:naofumin@iss.u-tokyo.ac.jp>

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