| Original language | English (US) |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 631-633 |
| Number of pages | 3 |
| Journal | ISIS |
| Volume | 111 |
| Issue number | 3 |
| DOIs |
|
| State | Published - Sep 1 2020 |
Bibliographical note
Funding Information:Aaron S. Moore was an associate professor at Ari-zona State University, with research interests in mod-ern Japan, the history of technology, and Japan’s re-lations with East and Southeast Asia in the twentieth century. He also designed a course on the global his-tory of World War II and initiated the Korean Stud-ies minor and certificate at ASU. His wide interests derived in part from his cosmopolitan childhood: Aaron was born in Yokusuka, Japan, and grew up in Tokyo, Vienna, and New York, among other cit-ies, following his father, Stephen W. Moore, in his work with the U.S. State Department and postings at a number of American embassies. As a result, Aaron was fluent in at least four languages—English, Japa-nese, Korean, and German—and an experienced traveler from a young age. His mother, Lisa Chung Park Moore, a writer and Korean-language educator, met Stephen during his service with the U.S. Peace Corps in South Korea. Aaron received his B.A. from the University of Virginia in 1994 and his Ph.D. in history from Cornell University in 2006. Before joining ASU, he was a research associate at the Reischauer Institute of Japanese Studies at Harvard University, taught at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Ohio University, and was the first Terasaki Postdoctoral Fellow at the Center for Japanese Studies at UCLA. Aaron received numerous fellowships, including the NEH Japan–U.S. Friendship Commission Fellowship and the Residential Scholarship at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science. He is survived by his parents and his wife, Nilanjana Bhattacharjya, his colleague at ASU and a musicologist with a Ph.D. Aaron was a tireless researcher. While well trained in theory as an intellectual historian, he was a scholar rooted in empirical research, whose solid expertise and inspiring ideas came from archives and interviews across multiple languages and countries. His first book, Constructing East Asia: Technology, Ideology, and Empire in Japan’s Wartime Era, 1931–1945 (2013), is built on extensive materials such as corporate records, engineering newsletters, and personal memoirs, in addition to various published materials, and reconceptualized technology as ideology and vision. Based on critical readings of the work of engineers, technology bureaucrats, intellectuals, and state planners, and using the concept of “comprehensive technology” (sō gō gijutsu), the book presented the “technological imaginary” of wartime Japan and its colonial construction as a blueprint for postwar Japanese techno-nationalist development. Aaron’s was the first work that critically examined the life and work of Kubota Yukata, the prominent yet understudied civil engineer who constructed the Sup’ung Dam, then the world’s third largest multipurpose dam, in colonial Korea and established postwar Japan’s largest consultancy agency, Nippon Koē i. The chapter on Kubota was published as an article in the