WHA Annual Meeting: Korea 2026

This paper examines the Asahan Project on Sumatra, a site that marketed developmentalism to Indonesian audiences, bound Indonesia to U.S.-led networks of international capitalism, and made Indonesian resources readily available to Japan’s advanced industrial economy during the 1970s and 1980s. The ambitious project set out to harness the kinetic energy of the cascading Asahan River, which drained the world’s largest caldera lake, and then regulate the prodigious electricity generated at two hydroelectric power stations to refine aluminum for export to Japan. Dutch-colonial era plans for Asahan grabbed the attention of occupying Japanese during World War II, most notably Kubota Yutaka, future chairman of Japan’s Nippon Kōei engineering consultancy. Kubota and other eager Japanese developers returned after Suharto’s takeover and presented Asahan as an example of Japanese engineering prowess; however, Asahan also featured prominently in the New Order’s own technonationalist justifications for power.

The Japanese empire is unique in that it built its largest industrial complex and hydropower dams in the colonies. My paper examines the Hungnam chemical complex in colonial Korea and the numerous hydropower dams that powered it, all built by Nippon Chisso, a Japanese nitrogenous fertilizer company, in the 1920s-1945. In many ways, Nippon Chisso exemplifies Japan’s hydro developmentalism. I highlight the company’s strategic choice of the water electrolysis method over the coal-based Herber-Busch method and compare it with Manchuria Chemical Industry (MCI), another giant but little studied chemical fertilizer manufacturer in Japan-occupied northeast China as an example of the coal-based developmentalism. By looking at the largest beneficiary of hydropower—the electrochemical fertilizer industry—I explore the networks of power generated and sustained through colonial hydropower development in Asia and aims to develop a theoretical understanding of hydro developmentalism and colonial dynamics.

This paper examines the shifting environmental relations and struggles of upstream and downstream interests surrounding the building of the Ōi Dam on the Kiso River in central Japan in the 1910s and 1930s. Highlighting competing upstream and downstream interests, I show how the struggle between existing users of the river and the new industrial interests in Nagoya garnered national attention due to the involvement of colorful figures like Fukuzawa Momosuke (president of Daidō Electric Company and son of the famed Fukuzawa Yukichi) and Shimazaki Hirosuke (brother of the well-known writer Shimazaki Tōson) and its seeming signification of a greater conflict between traditional and modern ways of life. Moreover, I argue that the Ōi and similar multipurpose dams fit within the country’s expanding modern river regime with its emphasis on controlling rivers for development and in doing so realigned the region’s existing environmental relations and networks of power.

In early 1940, before the outbreak of war between Japan and the United States, the Navy requested the Ministry of Home Affairs to develop power sources for military factories producing fuel alcohol. Consequently, the development of the upper Kitakami River basin became a plan to construct multiple multipurpose dams for power generation. This paper examines the construction of the Tase Dam on a tributary of the Kitakami River system: its commencement in 1941, subsequent suspension and resumption of work, and eventual completion in 1954. The Tase Dam construction project was reorganized after the war as a development initiative modeled on the U.S. TVA. To continue wartime river development projects, including the Tase Dam, the National Land Development Act was enacted in 1950. This National Land Development Act became the basis for the National Land Development Act (1962), marking the beginning of the era of comprehensive national land development.