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NLA News - home February 2006 Volume XVI Number 5

Engineer Kondoh’s Collection Lives On

click to enlarge
Engineer Kondoh Seichii
probably in his mid-30s.

Peter J. Rimmer explains how his fascination with the Japanese transport system led to the acquisition of the Kondoh Seiichi Collection

I had never heard of the engineer Kondoh Seiichi (the Japanese practice of putting the family name first is followed here) until I arrived in Japan during August 1978 to undertake a study of Japan’s seaports. However, I did meet his third son, Kondoh Rinnosuke, who was then working at the International Association of Ports and Harbors (IAPH) in Tokyo. Since that first meeting, Rinnosuke and I have been close friends.

As my interest in Japan’s transport history deepened, I recognised the importance of the planning experience gained by the Japanese in Manchukuo (Manchuria) before the Pacific war in reshaping Japan’s wartime and postwar transport systems, and questioned Rinnosuke accordingly. During a subsequent visit to Japan in the early 1980s I asked Rinnosuke about the proposed building of a tunnel under the Tsushima Strait, which would have linked Japan’s largest island of Honshu with the then colony of Kankoku (Korea). From behind a row of books in his office, Kondoh produced a volume with a diagram of the tunnel. More importantly, there was another map that not only showed the tunnel but also revealed that it was a component of an orbital railway linking Japan through Sakhalin to Manchukuo and then returning via Kankoku, with an offshoot to Shanghai.

The book was part of a collection made by Rinnosuke’s father, Kondoh Seiichi, throughout his interesting and prestigious career with Japan National Railways. Clearly an accomplished man, after retirement Kondoh Seiichi maintained an interest in academic matters, particularly mathematics. He was invited to lecture on thermal engines at a technical school (now Shibaura Kôgyô Daigaku) from 1964 to 1978, coached his third son and my friend Rinnosuke in quadratic equations, wrote technical papers and played the violin.

Following Kondoh Seiichi’s death at the age of 80, in March 1982, his second wife invited the Railway Engineering Research Institute (Tetsudô Gijutsû Kenkyû Shô) to look at the dossiers. They took a few items for their records and left the remainder for disposal. As there was also a smaller amount of material on aviation, a similar opportunity was afforded the Airport Affairs Research Group (Kukô Mondai Chôsa-Kai), a private consortium of experts on airport affairs which, in the 1980s, included consultants and architects. The group took several items, and Kondoh Rinnosuke retained some as keepsakes.

Very occasionally, Rinnosuke made reference to the minutes of the Shinkansen Group, and the wall map of the Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere (Daitôa Kyôeiken), which was to be politically and economically integrated under Japanese leadership and free of Western domination. Otherwise, the books remained hidden behind the front row in his shelves so as not to embarrass or offend visitors from East Asia about the Co-Prosperity Sphere who might be sensitive about Japan’s past colonial ambitions. As there was little support for a foreign academic wishing to formally investigate transport planning in prewar and wartime imperial Japan and its colonies; only when I visited Kondoh in Tokyo was I able to discuss the books hidden in his bookcase.

When Kondoh himself retired from IAPH in 2003, I suggested that he should give the material to me and, in turn, I would present it to Asian Collections at the National Library of Australia for safekeeping. This suggestion was motivated by the fact that I have given most of my Japanese language material to the Asian Collections and continue to make extensive use of both the facilities and the services of its staff.

The Kondoh Seiichi Collection material dates from 1900 to 1956, and some of the books are bound in traditional Japanese style using string (watoji). Much of the material kept by Rinnosuke in memory of his father is stamped ‘Top Secret’, ‘Military Secret’ or‘Secret’. This was common practice before and during the Pacific war when anything prepared by government officials was not for circulation among the general public.

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Photograph of railwaymen
taken in April 1935 in front of locomotive C51200. Engineer Kondoh Seiichi is seated on far right of the front row

The oldest item in the collection is the railway regulations, issued by National Railways in 1900, which outlines the laws governing railway operations and was presumably given to all new recruits into the service. Surprisingly, the second item is the SOLAS (Safety of Life at Sea) Convention which was initially adopted in 1914 in response to the Titanic disaster. This book is dated 1925 and must have been the first version of the international convention, as the second version was not adopted until 1929. Presumably, the book was in Kondoh’s possession because National Railways operated several important ferry services, including the Aomori–Hakodate train ferry (Seikan Renrakusen) between Honshu and Hokkaido.

Reflecting Kondoh’s eclectic transport interests, the third item, dated 1929, was about the existing situation of air transportation in Europe and America, a verbatim record of a speech made by Nishino Keinosuke, President of Japan Air Transport Company Limited, the forerunner of Japan Airlines. The Airport Affairs Research Group reproduced this item in April 1983 at the same time as it reproduced the List of World Records of Aviation of 1931 (also among Kondoh’s papers). Apparently, the engineer was also a collector of information on national railways outside Japan. There is material on the tariff regulations of public railways in Indochina published in 1933, and data on railways of the United States for the years 1938 to 1939. The plans of traffic systems in the United States, supplemented by those from Europe, were used by the government to develop an integrated transport system when Japan was on a Pacific war footing and already at war with China.

The most intriguing material is the minutes of the meetings of the Railway Trunk Line Research Group; its deliberations can be seen to lead to the construction of the Shinkansen (Bullet Train). On 20 July 1939, Transport Minister Maeda requested the group to inquire into the future prospects of the combined Tokaido (Tokyo–Osaka) and San’yo (Osaka–Shiminoseki) trunk lines, running 972 kilometres on an international standard gauge track (1435 mm or 4 feet 8½ inches). By 27 October 1939, 12 meetings had been held with the minutes emphasising that the Shinkansen had been in the making since 1910. They also reveal that Japanese railwaymen resented the fact that the government reneged on its 1910 decision to adopt a standard international gauge line. Instead, in 1918, the government adopted the narrow gauge so that railways reached every corner of the country. This reversal of policy not only placed severe technical restrictions on National Railways’ engineers but also precluded the possibility of travelling from Paris and London on a single train ticket purchased at any railway station in Japan.

The dream of adopting the international standard gauge was renewed in 1939. Despite the imminent prospect of further military disputes, National Railways decided to connect to the railways developed by the Japanese colonial administration on the Korean Peninsula using the standard gauge. The plan was to construct an undersea tunnel between Japan’s Kyushu Island and Kankoku. By the early 1940s, test boring for the Kyushu-Tsushima sector was a budget item. Using the Japanese islands of Iki and Tsushima as staging posts, the overall length of the tunnel system was expected to be between 200 and 230 kilometres. The length of the undersea portion alone was expected to exceed 50 kilometres. However, the ambitious plan was abandoned when Japan was defeated in the Pacific war. As Japan built up its tunnelling skills with the completion, in 1947, of a 17-kilometre undersea tunnel between Shiminoseki, on the western tip of the island of Honshu, and Moji, in Kyushu, it is not surprising that the plan for linking Japan and Korea resurfaced again in the 1980s. However, the prevailing political circumstances meant that no further action was taken. Had the tunnel been completed, it would have been comparable to the 54-kilometre Seikan Undersea Tunnel, connecting Aomori on Honshu Island with Hakodate on Hokkaido Island, that was constructed between 1963 and 1988.

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Japan’s 1940 plan for an orbital railway
Courtesy of Henshu Iinkai

The proposed 1940s link through Korea would have connected Japan to the developing transport networks of Manchuria and occupied China, often known as Nichi–Man–Shi (Japan–Manchuria–China), which was conceived as a test-bed for national self sufficiency (autakie) theories fashioned in the other fascist states of Germany and Italy.

Indeed, there are three envelopes in the Kondoh Collection with material on railways in China. The first, marked ‘The China North Transport Company Ltd’, contains an organisation chart and a railway development plan for Peking (Beijing). The latter is remarkable for its environmental considerations as high priority is given to preserving the beauty of the Old City. Documents in the second envelope, marked ‘China Central Railway Ltd’, include details on the operation of the super express between Shanghai and Nanjing in 1940, together with a table of locomotive ratings and a timetable. In the third envelope, pencilled in blue ‘Manchukuo Railways’, there is a rail allocation plan, a manning scale, maps and other ephemera. The Japanese Government had provided half the capital for the South Manchurian Railway Company to run railway systems in China. These systems were critical to the Japanese war effort as, unlike shipping and road transport, the railways did not need scarce fuel oil and gasoline but used local coal. After 1938, the National Railways contributed steam locomotives to support China’s railway systems that had been commandeered for use by the Japanese military forces (kyoshutsu). Substantial structural changes were required to the undercarriage so that the engines could run on the wider standard gauge in China. Their number included 16 C51 series locomotives, which were used to pull express trains between Shanghai and Nanjing. Stretching the C51 engines to run in China offended railway purists because, according to Imamura Kyoshi, it made the elegant engines ‘look like toads’.

The remaining material comprises information on transportation systems in both the Soviet Union in 1940 and South-East Asia in 1942—the latter being available only in an ‘Industries Edition’. Presumably, information on other national railway systems was required in laying out the railway network to deliver the troops and the material to underpin the Great East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere centred on Japan. A document reporting progress on transportation in the sphere is dated March 1942. The report underlines that the sphere not only incorporates North- East Asia but also South-East Asia, a then prized reservoir of raw materials such as tin and rubber. Japan’s expansionist policy was opposed by both the United States and the Soviet Union. In August 1942, the Council on the Construction of Greater East Asia, the Japanese Government’s advisory committee, submitted a report on ‘Basic Policy for Transportation in Greater East Asia’, which covered both North-East and South-East Asia. However, this critical report on how Japan was mobilising for total war is not included in the Kondoh Collection.

The documents on the Co-Prosperity Sphere, prepared during the Pacific war, contain little material written in English. Presumably, this was because English was deemed to be an adversary language. Contrarily, German was rather freely used and quoted in documents. Not surprisingly, the collection of documents included the national land planning and freight tariff policy, which referred to a case study of the Schulingen local area within the German national railways system (Deutsche Bundesbahn). The final item was a pamphlet entitled A Glimpse of the NW Route, operated by the South Manchurian Railway Company from Lü-shun (Port Arthur) to Changchun, via Lü-ta (Dairen/Dalian) and Mukden (Shenyang), over a distance of 1128 kilometres. The pamphlet was published in June 1944, only two months before the Pacific war was brought to an end.

Peter J. Rimmer is a Visiting Fellow at the School of Pacific and Asian History, Australian National University, and Hanjin Shipping Chair Professor of Global Logistics, Asia Pacific School of Logistics, Inha University, Incheon, Korea

 

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