Energizing the Tech-Nation: Hydroelectric and Atomic Power in Postwar Japan's Technonationalist Makeover

Because historians of Japan refer to the country’s late 1950s and 1960s economic boom as the “high growth era,” one may be tempted to label these years as self-confident or proud.  In fact, a close examination of policy discourse and public opinion from the time reveals deep-seated anxieties about declining communal values, underdeveloped living standards, uncomfortable World War II legacies, and a host of other issues.  These anxieties motivated and shaped Japan’s technological development throughout the postwar period.

One issue that truly absorbed policy commentators was the “resources problem.”  Definitions of this “resources problem” shifted over the course of the twentieth century, but in the high growth era, the phrase signaled concerns over Japan’s ability to supply its burgeoning manufacturing sector.  The very success of Japan’s postwar national reinvention as an “economic great power” and high-technology manufacturer hinged on steady streams of raw material and petroleum imports from often unsteady parts of the globe.  Accordingly, many commentators, who remembered the wartime blockades against Japan and feared the Cold War’s potential for global instability, questioned the sustainability of such reliance on imported resources.  Instead, they recommended that Japanese engineers direct their collective attention to the domestic energy infrastructure and maximize the country’s energy self-sufficiency.  In particular, they prescribed large, expensive hydroelectric dams and nuclear power plants as high-technology means of alleviating the resources problem.

My paper will examine these high growth-era promotions of energy self-sufficiency, as well as their chief outcomes: 1) the 1960s “dam boom,” which created new energy supplies but also channeled and restricted all of Japan’s major watersheds into networks of power production; and 2) the birth of a civilian nuclear power industry in a seismically-active country where memories of Hiroshima were still fresh.