Recent decades have seen an increasing awareness in academic literature that technology is neither culturally inert nor politically neutral; new technologies shape society, and symbolic narratives around technologies both reflect and perpetuate ideas about the world. To date, many of the narratives surrounding Japan's great technological achievements express the triumphalism of a people who emerged from centuries of self-imposed isolation to adopt and indigenize the best of Western knowledge. These narratives, though not inaccurate, are partial, especially as regards the complicated twentieth-century history of the shinkansen (bullet train), now an emblem of Japan's rebirth in the postwar era. Jessamyn Abel's new book excavates the history of the shinkansen and unearths the counternarratives, contestations, and contingencies surrounding its early development. The alternative narratives around this iconic technological achievement collectively convey the growing pains of a nation emerging but not yet free from the stigma of its wartime atrocities, reconstructing itself and...
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