The Technological Transformation in Imperial Japanese Navy and the Rise of Militarism
Introduction
In merely a few decades following the Meiji Restoration in 1868, the Imperial Japan transformed from a defenseless country humiliated by unequal treaties, to a political, economic, and military power parallel to the Western countries by prodigious effort. Due to the nature of Japan’s archipelago geography, the development of superior naval technology was a crucial enabler of its projection of power aboard. When Commodore Matthew C. Perry steered steam-powered warships into the Bay of Edo in 1853 and forced Japan to open the country, Japan was still prohibiting the construction of larges ships due to its policy of national seclusion. Yet, in forty
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However, duplicating the Western technology and building the fleet after Western standard could never make Japan a worthy opponent of the United States. Therefore, using the development of the Imperial Japanese Navy from the Meiji Restoration to the end of WWII as an example, I argue that carrying out internal innovations played a more important role than assimilating Western knowledge in transforming Japan’s military technology and engineering to support its militarism. The significance of those innovations is evident in Japan’s engineering education designed for war, its government-led military industry and research, and its technological breakthrough in the international military …show more content…
Among the 104 engineering graduates of Tokyo University from 1883 to 1903, 34 served in the navy. In order to secure engineers for military industry, Tokyo University added special departments for arms technology in 1887, which was unprecedented in Western countries. Furthermore, after the Second Sino-Japanese War erupted, the government decided to “mobilize engineers for national defense” through prescribing quotas for engineering graduates and sending them to designated places of employments, which included private and government-owned heavy