Culture and Technology in Modern Japan. Edited by Ian Inkster and Fumihiko Satofuka. London and New York: I. B. Tauris, 2000. Pp. vii, 169. $59.50.

Extract

In the Western countries, Japanese technological development continues to be seen largely as an effort of imitation and refinement; but any foreign visitor who has operated a Japanese-style bath or observed the processes of small-scale mechanized rice farming will understand that, besides refining originally Western technologies, Japan has also developed its own modern, yet distinctively non-Western, technological tradition. The theoretical questions involved in “Japanese-style” technological modernity are nontrivial, as are the practical implications. For instance, in newly industrializing Asia Japanese technological practices are now frequently proving more efficient or culturally comfortable than Western ones. The present volume's goal of exploring the “relations between the economic and the cultural” (p. vii) is thus timely as well as theoretically important.