When Tests Began: Psychological Testing in 20th Century Japan

Abstract

This dissertation revisits a social phenomenon that swept Japan from the 1920s to the late 1930s, known as the tesuto craze (tesuto hayari). While this craze is a well-recognized event in historiography, existing analyses have largely focused either on its importance as a symbol of the successful acclimation of a once-foreign scientific discipline or on how psychological tests facilitated the totalizing functions of modern institutions. The dissertation challenges such prescriptive interpretations, arguing that various psychological tests were not frictionlessly accepted by society. Instead, it traces how Japanese psychologists conceived tesuto – both as devices with the allure of scientific rigor and as the mode of producing and validating knowledge generated through these devices. The dissertation also demonstrates how these psychologists, motivated by self-interest to expand their occupational influence, had to persuade others of the utility of tesuto. In this process of persuasion, psychologists sometimes clashed with existing interest groups in industrial production, education, and medicine, leading to compromises on the technical rigor with which they defined tesuto as psychological experiments that allowed mental functions to manifest in tangible and measurable formats. As a consequence of these persuasive efforts, this dissertation posits that various mental traits such as aptitude, intellectual disposition, and temperament came to be perceived as quantifiable and predictable. As a whole, the dissertation reflects on broader themes of modernity, sociocultural negotiations in scientific development, and the quest to understand the human mind within an ever-changing society. By doing so, it considers the fundamental difficulty of fully understanding a person’s invisible traits and, by extension, predicting how that person will contribute to and shape the environment – a challenge that remained (and may forever remain) unresolved.