In this paper, we shed light on the intellectual roots of Japanese philosophers’ concepts of technology in the 1940s. We point out that Marxist philosopher Sakaji Yamada’s view in 1946 may be regarded as a branch of social constructivism of technology and that Yamada followed Haruki Aikawa’s view of the wartime.
Japanese debate on the nature of technology had begun in the 1930s. We can name many left-minded persons who actively worked in this field, but the most brilliant among them has been Aikawa, who was a Marxist in his young age but then cooperated with the Japanese militarist government during wartime. Before him, the most accepted definition of technology was that technology is the system of instruments of labor. Aikawa, succeeding in the development of this concept, formed his original view around 1940, which was based on the relationship between labor and technology.
After the end of the war, the first debate on the nature of technology in occupied Japan occurred between Yamada and Mitsuo Taketani, a well-known physicist, in 1946. This debate occurred in the absence of Aikawa because he surrendered to the Soviet army in August 1945 and was kept in Siberia at that time. Taketani, denying the previous (including Aikawa’s) concepts of technology, argued that the nature of technology lies in the conscious application of the objective natural law. Yamada, opposing to this view, stated that Taketani oversaw the dialectical relationship between nature and human labor. According to Yamada, technological foundation of a society does not have its roots on nature that exists as an isolated system from human labor, namely technology is a sociological phenomenon, not the simple application of the natural law.
Taketani responded to Yamada indirectly, but because of the former’s arrogance and offensiveness, sadly, disputes between them did not lead to fruitful results. Vulgarness of this battle between Taketani and Yamada may have let historians not to consider it seriously. However, if we regard writings of Yamada concretely, it appears that his standpoints have much in common with those of social constructivism of technology. His view presents a striking contrast with those of Taketani, which were similar to technological determinism or technological utopianism.
By examining books and pamphlets of the wartime period in Japan, we also point out that Yamada’s concept was not original, but writings of Aikawa may have matured Yamada’s dialectical view.