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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.