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Early Japanese Railways 1853-1914: Engineering Triumphs That Transformed Meiji-era Japan

Dan Free

Start date: April 6, 2022

Finish date: June 1, 2022

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Jun 01, 2022 ambyr rated it liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: acquiredㅡbought-used, i-am-exactly-the-right-audience, genreㅡnonfiction, authorㅡmale, ownㅡcurrently, genreㅡnonfictionㅡjapan, genreㅡnonfictionㅡtransit

Digression time: when I was in college, I minored in Japanese history. I was fascinated by modern and early modern Japan, by the rapid pace of industrialization, by the lessons they did and didn't learn from those who had industrialized just before them. I had an amazing professor who I think would have loved if I'd switched to a history major, who would have happily written me letters of recommendation for grad school.

There was just one problem: I don't speak Japanese. I did the best I could wi Digression time: when I was in college, I minored in Japanese history. I was fascinated by modern and early modern Japan, by the rapid pace of industrialization, by the lessons they did and didn't learn from those who had industrialized just before them. I had an amazing professor who I think would have loved if I'd switched to a history major, who would have happily written me letters of recommendation for grad school.

There was just one problem: I don't speak Japanese. I did the best I could with what I had. I scrounged up self-published translations of obscure memoirs. I read period Western takes and tried to read between the lines of racism and lack of cultural competency. The interlibrary loan desk clerk became my best friend. I wrote, if I do say so myself, some damn good undergraduate papers. But if you are going to major in Japanese history--if you are going to go on and make a career of Japanese history--you need Japanese; you need to be able to read the primary sources, all of them, not just the random sprinkle that exist in English translation.

I am god-awful terrible at picking up languages. My many years of Spanish and Hebrew barely got me to the point of "hello, where is the bathroom?" Japanese was a hill too far. And so I set aside my ambitions of becoming a historian--because next to modern Japan, everything else paled in interest to teenage ambyr--and went down a different career track. It worked out pretty well.

Okay, so back to the book. Early Japanese Railways is meticulously researched, pulling together memoirs, period newspaper articles, and archival documents to build both a technical and political history of Meiji-era rail. I personally empathize with the effort that went into assembling that level of detail . . . because Free, as far as I can tell, also does not speak Japanese. There are, admittedly, a handful of Japanese-language books in the bibliography, but every archival document, periodical, and memoir he cites is from the US or the UK.

The result is impressive. It's also deeply, deeply one-sided. Sometimes Free recognizes the biases of his sources (though he also often seems puzzled by it; this is not a book in which the word "racism" ever appears); sometimes he just accepts their take wholesale. We are told the Japanese resisted using some forms of modern technology; we are never told why, even though 19th-century Japan was a widely literate society and some of the people making these choices undoubtedly left letters and diaries. (Incidentally, the role of the railways in delivering the mail is never discussed, even though epistolary communications were essential in this era.) We get lengthy verbatim quote after verbatim quote about what Westerners felt was and wasn't comfortable about railway travel in Japan; we get zero quotes from Japanese travelers.

If Free can't fluently read Japanese (and reading handwritten archival documents is no joke even for people who do have modern conversational fluency), then this is probably the only book he could have written. I am of mixed opinions as to whether it's a book that should have been written. There is detail here I'm glad to have, but reading it is a deeply weird experience, like trying to make sense of a painting through a latticework screen.

There are other weirdnesses here that have nothing to do with language fluency. The Aishio Copper Mine comes up; the fact that it was Japan's first major environmental disaster (in the period being covered) and is widely credited with having launched the Japanese environmental movement does not. It's just cited as a positive example of progress, and then the book moves on. Likewise Japan's colonial ambitions in Korea and Taiwan are discussed entirely in terms of realpolitik; Koreans and Taiwanese as people are invisible in the narrative. In a different, more technical book focused entirely on the structure and connection of the railways, I'd be willing to accept this as "beyond the scope of the work," but there are too many political digressions here for me not to find the way in which they're handled jarring.

Finally: this book is very poorly edited. "It's" and "its" are frequently confused, titles of publications like the New York Times rotate between appearing in italicized and roman text (sometimes in quotes, sometimes not), and sentence fragments abound. Also (and this is not usually a complaint I'd make!) no one appears to have told Free that just because he can include a photo of almost every train and station in 19th century Japan doesn't mean he should; sections of the book are so heavy with images and image captions that the actual main narrative text occupies only one or two column inches across a two-page spread. (This is more a dig at the layout team than at Free; there really should just have been a photos section in the middle so the narrative text had space to breathe.)

All of this makes it sound like I'm not recommending this book. And I guess it's fair to say that for most people, I'm not. But if you really want to know about Meiji-era railroads and you only read English . . . well, there is definitely content here worth consuming. It's just a bad starting and ending point for learning modern Japanese history as a whole. ...more

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Jun 10, 2022 kelly rated it liked it · review of another edition

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