Jürgen Melzer’s history of aviation in Japan speaks to several audiences. For readers interested in the history of aviation, and particularly in the development of aircraft as military technology, the book offers a clear and detailed account that begins with balloon flights in the late nineteenth century and ends with attempts to develop jet engines during the last stages of World War II. Melzer writes with an authority unique among Anglophone scholars of Japan. Before becoming a professional historian, he had a previous career as an airline pilot for Lufthansa; he brings to his work an intimate knowledge of the engineering of aircraft as well as the pleasures and challenges of flying them. His straightforward narrative means that each chapter delivers on its title’s promise—“The French Decade,” “Japan’s Naval Aviation Taking the Lead,” “Jet and Rocket Technology for Japan’s Decisive Battle,” and so on—with few diversions from the central theme. The chapters are, moreover, grounded in a wealth of primary and secondary sources in Japanese, German, French, and English. Wings for the Rising Sun surely has a long career ahead of it as the standard, go-to work on the history of flying in Japan.
Anyone with even a glancing knowledge of modern Japanese military history will be familiar with one theme running through the book: the fierce, dysfunctional rivalry between the army and navy. The two services developed their own aviation programs, with the army looking to Germany for early inspiration and the navy to France. Engineers eschewed opportunities to cooperate and even concealed innovations from one another. In their competition for funding and prestige, each service emphasized technology that augmented its core mission of land- or sea-based warfare at the cost of duplicated effort and missed opportunities to exploit prescient proposals to treat the air as a critical strategic space in its own right.
The Japanese engineers, aviators, and entrepreneurs at the book’s center were full participants in a global network of technological innovation. Far from passive recipients of one-way information flows, they made important innovations nearly as often as they borrowed them. By treating the Japanese as full-fledged participants in global knowledge flows, Melzer puts to rest surprisingly durable stereotypes of them as latecomers to modernity who appropriated “Western” scientific and technological expertise whole cloth, aping but not contributing to the rapid advances of the first half of the twentieth century. To be sure, knowledge flowed east from Europe, most importantly in the immediate aftermath of World War I, when Japan took advantage of its place among the victorious allies to appropriate German planes and the know-how to build them. But the same knowledge flowed west as well, to Britain and the United States. Marvels like the famed Zero fighter were the product of decades of intense engagement with global technological development.
University of California Press