The Closing of the Japanese Frontier: Settler Technocracy and Postwar Japanese Infrastructure

Abstract: For a cadre of influential figures in politics, business, urban planning, and architecture, the Japanese surrender in August 1945 marked the "closing of the Japanese frontier." With overseas expansion no longer an option due to the loss of the colonies and global decolonization, political and business elites turned to investments in industrial technology and the intensification of land use. Techno-utopian discourses about the potential of postwar science and technology replaced settler colonial discourses about terra nullius as the engine of economic growth and as a leveling force in Japanese society. Through critical reappraisals of major development projects in postwar Japan, this article develops the concept of "settler technocracy" to capture how settler colonial epistemologies and technocratic governance were in dynamic interrelationship in postwar Japan.