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製糸業の工場制工業化と繭の乾燥 
鈴木淳 (東京大学)

 本報告では、繭の乾燥技術を取り上げ、日本の自然環境が工場制工業化の過程に及ぼした影響を考えたい。
日本では従来から生糸が生産されていたが、1859年に外国貿易が本格化すると、輸出産業として急速に成長し、1930年代に至るまで日本の最大の輸出品であった。生糸の生産は、養蚕と製糸の二つの工程からなる。このうち、養蚕は日本の自然環境に合わせて形成されていた在来技術が、発展しつつ普及していった。製糸は、従来は農家で養蚕と共に行われていたが、1870年からイタリアの小規模工場の製糸技術が移入され、1872年にはフランスの大規模工場の技術を移植した官営富岡製糸場が開業した。これらの技術を参照しつつ、当時の国内の工業技術や資金力にあわせて簡易化し、1880年代までにボイラーや動力を用いた工場制の製糸技術が形成された。1900年前後には工場制での生糸生産が養蚕農家の兼業によるものを上回り、1910年前後には輸出量が中国を上回り、世界一の生糸輸出国となった。このころから、養蚕には一代雑種が導入されて繭の品質が向上し、製糸では先進国とほぼ同水準の機械が開発され、以後日本が技術的に世界最高水準を保ちながら1930年代のピークに至る。
しかし、生糸の工場制生産が確立する過程で、富岡製糸場が置かれた群馬県では、養蚕農家による製糸を基本に、その製品を共同で揚げ返すことで品質の統一を図る改良座繰が主流となり、製糸の工場制工業化は長野県の諏訪を中心に進んだ。この工場制工業化の遅れ、ないし地域的偏りについて、未だ説得的な説明はなされていない。
報告者が注目したいのは、生糸の工場制生産に必要な、繭を乾かす技術である。養蚕農家が合わせて製糸を行う場合、繭ができると速やかに製糸をはじめ、半月ほどの間に製糸を終えたので、繭の保存については気にする必要がなかった。十数日経つと、繭を破って蛾が出てしまうので、その可能性がある場合には、繭に直射日光を当てて干し、蛹を殺していた。これに対して工場制の製糸の場合には、長期間操業するため、殺蛹した繭を乾燥して貯える必要があった。繭に直射日光を当てると、品質を損ねるので、製糸先進国であるイタリアやフランスでは蒸気を当てて殺蛹し、自然乾燥させて保存しており、日本にもその技術が紹介された。しかし、繭の乾燥が課題となる7,8月の湿度は、MilanoやLyonでは57~67%であったのに対し、日本や中国の製糸地帯では80~84%におよび自然乾燥だけでは十分でなかった。そこで、日本や中国での製糸業の工場制工業化には、火力での繭乾燥の技術を確立する必要があった。そのために、保温性、耐火性がある乾燥室が作られたが、1897年に上海周辺の養蚕地帯を視察した群馬県の養蚕家は中国の乾燥室の方が日本の一般的なそれより優れていると報告している。両国の煙突や煉瓦の利用の歴史を考えれば、当然である。蒸気管や回転装置、扇風機などの機械要素もとりいれて、さまざまな試行錯誤が行われた日本で乾燥技術が確立するのは1910年前後と遅かったが、試行錯誤はその後の乾燥の機械化へとつながって行った。
日本の中でも、諏訪地方は湿度が低く、十分に乾燥しない繭でも保存できると知られていた。実際には平均湿度のデータだけで諏訪の好条件を裏付けることは難しく、気温や他の条件も作用していると考えられるが、当時の日本人はヨーロッパとの差異を「多湿」として認識していた。
ヨーロッパと日本・中国の気候の違いは工場制工業技術を導入する上で障害となり、それは中国でより早く解決され、日本では技術開発の誘因となったが解決は遅れた。そこで、例外的に自然環境に恵まれた諏訪で工場制生産が先行して発達し、生糸の品質に敏感な先進地域である群馬県では、繭乾燥の技術が確立するまで、その必要がない改良座繰が主流だったと考えられる。

Technology in Modern East Asian History Workshop, June 11-12, 2015

Organized by Aleksandra Kobiljski, CNRS/EHESS-CCJ, France
Hosted by Needham Research Institute, Cambridge, UK

THURSDAY, JUNE 11

9.00 am – 10.45 am  

Lisa Onaga (Nanyang Technological University, Singapore): Engineering Cocoons: Making Silkworm Heredity Work

Engineering Cocoons examines a history of the mass production of silk tied to a history of heredity spanning a hundred years across the mid-nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This study examines a period of imperial ideology during which Japan disarmed and countered the potential threat of Western domination, in part, through experimentation with silkworms and their cocoons. The silk trade helped direct foreign capital into the country and also led to debates among scientists and producers over what dictated silk cocoon qualities. The reconfiguration of cocoons as scientific hybrids provides insight into how the Japanese appeared to produce “universal” knowledge in biology while simultaneously developing their own version of pan-Asian identity in the region. Its setting within global commerce and industry allows Anatomy of a Hybrid to probe why the formation of the cocoon reconstituted the very meaning of hybrid for multiple actors and institutions, as they dealt with anxieties about race, national unity, and silk standards, in order to chronicle the making of biological knowledge.

11.00 am – 12.30 pm   Kate McDonald, (University of California Santa Barbara, US): Systems Thinking: Transport Engineers, Geography, and the Crisis of Convenience in the  Japanese Empire

Systems Thinking explores how transportation engineers made sense of movement as a system in imperial Japan in the 1920s and 1930s. I focus on the history of the Nihon kôtsû kyôkai (Japan transportation association), and a group of studies published between 1915 and 1940 that defined transportation as a problem of systems engineering rather than of technology as such. I show that these engineers saw the pursuit of “convenience” (benri) as the motive force of historical progress and, in so doing, turned History into an argument for empire and for the expansion of capitalist society. Systems Thinking is one piece of a larger project that looks at how different groups conceptualized mobility in twentieth century Japan. Long treated as a story synonymous with the history of modern Japan itself, the project argues that the history of mobility has far more to tell us than a simple progression from slow to fast, or from pre-industrial to industrial. Rather, through a study of the social history of rickshaws, movement and everyday life, transport geography and engineering, and the concept of “Asian” mobility, I show that not only did mobility play a central role in the construction of Japanese society in the twentieth century but that it also constitutes a foundational — if unexamined — component of the writing of the history of the so-called “non-West.”

12.30 pm – 1.30 pm    Lunch  break

1.30 pm – 3.00 pm   Aleksandra Kobiljski (CNRS/EHESS, France): When Bad Planning is Good: Innovating in Japan’s First Industrialization

When Bad Planning is Good explores the engineering expertise and knowledge sharing in the process of devising protocols for producing metallurgical coke from local coals in the 1890s and 1900s. Reading reports and essays of most oligarchs and even biographies of some engineers, it may seem that spearheading industrial modernity in Japan was, with minor glitches, a smooth and planned affair. Yet, a closer look at the operational level and the process of setting up industrial production surprisingly poor planning seemed to have been the norm. Rather than dwelling on the reasons behind questionable choices and lessons not learned, this paper suggests that all that bad planning turned out to be good for stimulating innovation and fostering the creativity of engineers and foremen. Paper examines the ways in which specific local technical challenges were resolved along the way, largely by disregarding engineering orthodoxies and questioning the definitions of operational excellence devised in a different technical culture.

3.00 pm – 3.30 pm    Coffee Break

3.30 pm – 5.00 pm   Shinichiro Nakamura (University of Nagoya): Designing a Deluge: History of the Estimating Method in Flood Design

Designing a Deluge explores the introduction of the concept and method of what flood specialists call Project Design Flood (PDF). The PDF technique, including the calculation of the flood factor, was brought to Japan by Dutch engineers in the early the Meiji period 1862-1912). Untill 1945, it was calculated using the largest flood discharge in recorded history as a base line. However, after World War II, Makurazaki typhoon in 1945, Kathleen typhoon in 1947, Ione typhoon in 1948 and the record braking rainfall in Western Japan in 1953 lead to a number of floods exceeded the PDF calculations. In their wake, the floods and the damage they mete, wrecked not only infrastructure and livelihood of inhabitatns but also the reliability of the PDF method.  To imporve it, updating the risk factor for a large number of rivers in Japan. Yet, if recalculated based on the recorded post-WWII flood discharge data, the new PDF factors would require massive spending for flood protection. Aware of the impossibility to investe on such scale, government officials opeted to change the prediction method to Exceedance Probability Method (EPM). Developed in the United States before World War II, its adoption in Japan enabled flood protection to fit the national budget. In recent years, with the shrinking public spending, the estimating method and concepts have became again a topic of heated debate in both the public and academic spheres. By tracing the genesis and the evolution of the flood design method, this paper shows the ways in which it has been historically shaped by both technological change and political and economic exigencies.

FRIDAY, JUNE 12

9.00 am – 10.30 am  Zhang Xueqian (Needham Research Institute, UK): Uterine Disturbances: Curing Women in Nineteenth-Century Japan and China

Uterine Disturbances traces the discourse on the pathology of the womb and the development of treatment techniques in Japan and China in the nineteenth and early twentieth-centuries. Although womb was a defined organ in East Asian medical tradition, it is only in the nineteenth century that, after intensive interaction with Western medicine, it came to be conceived as an organ primarily responsible for women’s health, constitution, and behavior. Specifically, the paper examines the emergence of a new disease zôsô 臟屯 and its diagnosis and treatment in Japanese medicine. Existent in the ancient Chinese medical canon Synopsis of Prescriptions of the Golden Chamber 쏜匱狼論, zôsô was equated with shikyûkan 綾宮癇, a neologism coined to translate hysteria. Some doctors claimed to have successfully used a decoction recipe involving licorice, wheat, and Chinese dates to cure women patients from convulsions, depression, and excessive worry. Later, this recipe evolved into various popular medicines marketed as the treatment for women. In so doing, doctors in Japan and China remade traditional techniques, designated to enhance Qi and Blood in a gender-neutral body, into a gendered treatment of symptoms caused by biological uteruses.

11.00 am – 12.30 pm   
Shi-Lin Loh (Harvard University, USA): Manufacturing Radiation: Radiological Machines and Managers in Pre-War Japan

There are numerous controversies in Japan surrounding the exposure of Japanese bodies to ionizing radiation after 1945, of which the Fukushima nuclear meltdown is only the most recent. Medical radiation lies in the background of the more sensational accidents linked to nuclear weapons and nuclear power generation. It is an avenue through which ordinary Japanese people encountered ionizing radiation long before the atomic bombings, and which is still part of a standard infrastructure of contemporary healthcare. X-ray machines are the earliest instantiation of medical radiation technology, gaining traction in the field of modern, Western medicine in Japan by the early 20th century. But what lies behind their production – what enables a rentogen kikai or sÞchi to be used for medical purposes? Besides doctors and patients, manufacturers and technical operators deserve equal consideration as actors implicated in networks of medical technologies. This paper will analyze the machines and managers of radiology by discussing the activities of the Shimadzu Corporation in Japan c.1900 to 1945. Shimadzu was a major Japanese manufacturer of X-ray machines and a key actor in producing a class of technicians in Japanese radiology. The Shimadzu case shows that rentogen or X-rays are an important background piece of the puzzle in how radiation became institutionalized as medical practice in Japan.

 

Workshop made possible by the generous support of:
Daiwa Anglo-Japanese Foundation, The Needham Research Institute, Society for the History of Technology, 
Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Joint Research Unit: China, Korea, Japan-EHESS/CNRS

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Technology and History in Japan

Eminent sign of assent to modernity for some, source of social and environmental destruction for others, Japan’s transformation from an agrarian economy to an industrialized nation-state was subject to methodologically-diverse approaches across different sub-disciplines such as economic, environmental, business, and technology history. The goal of this blog is to bring together scholars using different methods and sources to study aspects of Japan’s industrialization from a global perspective. Beyond discussion of technological dimensions of industrialization process in Japan, the blog serves as a platform for discussing sources and methodology, as well as to work towards identifying key research themes for further collaboration.