ABSTRACT
Japan in the mid-1890s was a very different place from the one that Perry encountered a few decades before. The technological landscape had changed along with the way that people thought about technological artifacts indigenous and foreign. Initially indigenous technologies were considered an acceptable base upon which to build the nation. Built from wood, however, Japan’s machines, like its buildings, would not stand the test of ‘civilization’ as foreign beliefs in the superiority of iron and brick forged in Japan a progress ideology of materials. Within a few short years of the restoration of imperial rule, iron girders replaced the wooden beams which spanned many of Japan’s rivers, brick buildings stood where wooden structures once endured, and iron machines supplanted their functional wooden equivalents.
