Energy Workarounds: Designing Coals for the Japanese Steel Industry, 1895–1911

Japan's Meiji oligarchs put a premium on technologies that projected "civilization" and "modernity" and operated under the assumption that industrial technologies could be operationalized reasonably promptly. Their faith flew in the face of production experience. The case of metallurgical coke manufacturing offers an example of what happened when imported technological systems dead-ended on the fctory floor. Examining the production records of a Meiji-era chemical start-up, this article brings to focus the scope and scale of the creative labor needed to make imported technologies work on the ground. In so doing, it showcases innovative forces that formed the fabric of Japan's early industrialization as a corrective to the much-criticized but resilient notion that the country's industrial takeoff was enabled largely by technology transfer and local appropriation. By highlighting the creativity involved in designing coal inputs, this article opens new perspectives on the history of coals in East Asia.