- Convenor:
-
Ian Miller
(Harvard University)
Send message to Convenor
- Discussant:
-
Takehiro Watanabe
(Sophia University)
- Format:
- Panel
- Section:
- History
Short Abstract
Takes a critical approach to the “new materialism” at work in recent research on Japan, bringing questions of time into sharper focus. Individual papers deal with singular types of things (silica), systems (the grid), and machines (robotics) to enrich our field's approach to materialist analysis.
Long Abstract
This panel takes a critical approach to the “new materialism” at work in recent research on Japan, bringing questions of temporality into sharper focus. What is the relationship between things—material objects, the physical world and their affordances—and value or a set of values, and how have those relationships changed over time in modern Japan? Drawing on work from anthropologists and historians whose research touches on multiple nation-states and former colonies, we ask how the methodological “material turn” shifts when we take questions of time into more fulsome consideration. Our shared starting point is the straightforward assumption that the significance of things arises not only through immediate form, but also via transformations over time. Grounded in diverse, at times conflicting, ontologies of time and source materials, these papers bring engineering, environmental, ethnographic, medical, and scientific approaches to the effort to better reconcile time and materiality.
Our papers hold physical specificity in tension with the social, cultural, and political dynamics that are often front-and-center in Japan Studies, showing how different kinds of things shaped histories and cultures differently over time. Individual papers deal with singular types of things (silica), systems (the electrical grid), and machines (cutting-edge robotics). Silica: Long recognized as a threat to miners’ health via “black lung disease” (jinpai), silica took on new significance after World War II. Where wartime regimes focused on bodily sacrifice, often expressed through ravaged colonial bodies, postwar Japanese miners’ encounters with those same razor-sharp microscopic crystals emerged as a powerful driver of social reform, accelerating the development of the postwar welfare state. The grid: Materials are best understood relationally when embedded in system. This paper offers a deeply materialist account of Japan's electrical grid at its inception in 1907, arguing that this system--Japan's largest machine--is best understood as the product of conflicting enviro-technical commodity chains. Robotics: this paper reveals how the study of things is not always an analysis of proximity. Focused on the development of remote technologies in some of the world’s most toxic settings—Fukushima, Chernobyl, Three Mile Island—it draws on new records of robotic development to analyze a novel “technology of distantiation”.
| Abstract in Japanese (if needed) |
Accepted papers
Paper short abstract
What material affordances—technologies, raw materials, siting considerations—enabled the formation of Japan’s early electric grid? This paper offers a deeply materialist account of Japan's largest machine, the grid, at the moment of its formation in 1907.
Paper long abstract
“The water of the river will become capital (shihon).” Scribbled into the notes section of an engineer’s record book on December 20, 1907, this short sentence marked a transformational moment in Japan’s material modernization: the first long-distance transmission of electrical power in the archipelago. The anonymous author—an employee of the Tokyo Electric Light Company (predecessor of today’s Tokyo Electric Power Company [TEPCO])—was unlikely to have realized how astute his observation was: from 1907 Japan’s electrical power sector became the second-most highly capitalized sector of the imperial economy, following only banks themselves. The entry’s author may have been unnamed, but the location that inspired his observation was clear: Komahashi Power Station in Yamanashi Prefecture, 76 kilometers from Waseda Substation, where 55kV electricity generated in the mountains of rural Yamanashi was stepped down via transformers for local use. Electricity could now be manufactured far from its use points. Production could shift away from thermal power plants located close to cities, reducing the social and environmental costs of modernity’s energy-intensive culture. Hydropower was on the cusp of changing the archipelago and overseas empire’s energy landscapes.
This history is well known to those who care to look. It fills TEPCO’s official histories; it is stuffed into webpages scrolled by otaku reveling in technological fascinations; it can even be found on Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport, and Tourism’s “dam cards” (damu kādo), collectable cards featuring photos of Japan’s larger dams. Less well known, perhaps because it is buried in dispersed archives, is the material history of the transformation that began at Komahashi. This paper uncovers the material affordances that facilitated the transformation of the archipelago, enabling the emergence of Japan as one of the world’s largest consumers of electricity and, via the same system, the conversion of the simple reality that water is pulled downhill by gravity into vast quantities of capital. Electricity is big business enabled by big kit infrastructure. This paper elucidates the elements, minerals, alloys, and machinery whose use and manufacture defined the threshold of modern life in energetic terms.
Paper short abstract
This paper examines the historical link between the development of remote technologies—particularly arm manipulators and robots—and progress in the nuclear industry by framing robotics as a technology of distantiation that has afforded a particular human-nuclear relations and radioactive present.
Paper long abstract
This paper examines the historical link between the development of remote technologies—particularly arm manipulators and robots—and progress in the nuclear industry. Tracing their coevolution through the “magic hands” featured at the Atoms for Peace Exhibition in Japan during the 1950s, remote manipulators used in nuclear accidents at Sellafield, Three Mile Island, and Chernobyl, as well as various physical AIs—mobile robots—involved in the ongoing decommissioning of damaged reactors at Fukushima Nuclear Power Station, I highlight how the desire to protect humans from radiation exposure, especially a series of nuclear disasters, fueled the development of mechanical others. In this way, I present robotics as a technology of distantiation that has helped establish a safe physical and emotional distance between humans and unruly radiological materials. By focusing on the material affordances of mechanical arms, hands, legs, and bodies in radioactive environments, I analyze what current robot-driven decommissioning efforts at sites like Sellafield, Three Mile Island, and Fukushima reveal about the future of nuclear energy and, in turn, robotics amid AI-driven global enthusiasm for nuclear power and rising climate crises.
Paper short abstract
This paper explores how workers, trade unions, and labor scientists generated knowledge about how the air in mineral mines affected workers’ health. This knowledge enabled the Japanese state to redefine citizenship, transform from an empire into a nation-state, and reconceptualize public welfare.
Paper long abstract
Silica, as a material, played an important role in shaping Japan’s postwar history. By inhaling silica-rich dust during the excavation of minerals such as copper and coal, Japanese mine workers absorbed silica into their bodies, leading to pathological changes in their once-healthy lungs and causing irreversible damage to their health. For a long time in Japan, however, the occupational disease caused by silica-laden air—silicosis—received little attention from either corporations or the state. Workers endured the disease, lived with its effects, and often died miserable deaths, slowly suffocating from the late nineteenth century through the early twentieth century.
In 1954, Japan enacted its first law to protect workers suffering from silicosis, prompted initially by pressure from the trade union at the Ashio Copper Mine, the largest copper mine in the country. Who made the invisible traces of silica in mine air visible? At a time when copper prices had fallen and the postwar government no longer regarded copper as a strategic mineral, how did copper workers succeed in making their health concerns a national priority? This paper examines how workers, trade unions, labor scientists, and medical specialists rendered silica-laden air and its effects on the human body visible. It further argues that postwar workers’ movements around occupational disease redefined the meaning of citizenship, redrew the political boundaries of Japan as a nation-state, and reshaped the country’s understanding of the welfare state.