Dissertation Research: Civilian Application of Military Aeronautical Technology in Japan, 1920s-1960s

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This dissertation project will offer a new non-Western perspective that will contribute appreciably to greater international and social understanding about transfer of engineering knowledge from war to peace. Specifically, it focuses on the transformation of aeronautical technology in Japan from the 1920s through 1960s and for its completion requires data collection and analysis in Tokyo, Kanagawa and Aichi prefectures in Japan for five months. By linking Japan's rapid postwar economic growth during the 1960s to development of wartime technology and engineering culture, this project argues that the wartime engineers rather than civilian engineers shaped postwar, peace-oriented technological development in Japan, as represented in high-speed ground transportation like the bullet train. It will examine the institutional cultures and individual engineers that encouraged the civilian application of military aeronautical technology in trans-World War II Japan, which is an intricately tangled history of war and peace in the social history of technology. The intellectual and social merits of this project are twofold. First, this case study of Japanese aeronautics will expand the range of national comparison in the field, which has exclusively drawn from Western experiences, to a non-Western society that has made a successful contribution. It will redress the imbalance in an area of scholarship where non-Western societies, such as Japan, are underrepresented. Secondly, it will suggest an alternative configuration of social networks between research and educational institutions for successful technological development.