Episode 493 – Wired Up

Unknown Speaker
Four years earlier, a rangaksha, or student of Dutch, that is to say Western learning, by the name of Sakuma Shozan, had built his own functional model telegraph using diagrams from European books he had acquired and translated. Sakuma was an ardent follower of news from outside Japan and had become convinced in the wake of China’s disastrous defeat in the First Opium War that a similar fate awaited Japan if It did not adapt modern technology to its own defense. For his troubles, he was assassinated in the 1860s by radical anti-foreign samurai for being too pro-Western.

Unknown Speaker
But it was Fukuzawa Yukichi, the great intellectual of the early Meiji era, who really brought the idea of the telegraph into public consciousness. His 1866 work Seiyou Jijou, or Conditions in the West, was one of the first popular works written to explain life outside of Japan to a Japanese audience. Written on the basis of notes Fukuzawa took from 1860 to 62, during missions to the United States and Europe, the book was also written in a style closer to vernacular Japanese, making It far more accessible to the average audience than most books on affairs in the West, which were written in a more classical and thus much more difficult style.

Unknown Speaker
Even today, the rhetoric we hear about technology is that it is all about convenience. It’s going to save time, make our lives more efficient, all that jazz. But the system was not really efficient at all when it came to telephones in Japan. For the first few decades of their existence, the system was just plain outclassed by telegrams and even by snail mail. In Tokyo, the mail was delivered 10 times a day, meaning a letter could realistically cross the city within just a few hours, and get there faster than a phone call could go through the Exchange system. And that wasn’t even accounting for the fact that most people in the country didn’t even have access to telephones. The system didn’t even get routed into rural areas. Until the 1950s, when the post-war government came under pressure to extend modern technological infrastructure into the countryside in order to win rural votes. This despite the fact that until the middle of the 20th century, Japan’s population was primarily rural, not urban. And yet people flocked to use this new technology literally to the point of creating bottlenecks in the exchange system. And that, I think, raises a very interesting question. Do we actually adopt new technology because it’s efficient and useful and produces genuine value? Or is there just something about newness, about the cutting edge, that is exciting, even if getting the cutting edge to actually, you know, work is kind of a massive pain.

Unknown Speaker
The numbers are not quite as extreme in North China, which never had the same size of Japanese settler population as Manchuria. A three-day survey by NCTT found in 1940 that 58.4% of telegrams sent and 57% of telegrams received were in Japanese. But those numbers are still massively skewed relative to the size of Japanese population in the area, indicative of a system of privileged access for Japanese residents who were far Better off than most of the natives of the colonies. These disparities were even reflected in things like news dispatches on the telegraph system, which vastly privileged information coming from Japan to the colonies rather than The other way around. In 1933, 1,050 press telegrams were sent from Japan to Korea, 1,100 to Taiwan, and over 1,200 to the Japanese colonies in southern Sakhalin. By comparison, press reports going the other way, from colony to colonial power, were very scarce. Sakhalin had the most at 600, presumably because its proximity to the Soviet Union made developments there of particular concern. Korea got only 400, Taiwan 100. All told, the picture that emerges is pretty clear. The telecommunications network existed primarily for the benefit of Japan’s colonial ambition, with little to no thought being given to how it served, or did not serve, the non-Japanese Population.