Japan is one of the most successfully electrified countries in the world, but it does not have a unified national electric power grid: the country is divided into two zones with different standards for alternating current (50 and 60 Hz). To explore the root of Japan's split grid, this essay adopts technology historian Thomas Hughes’ socio-technical system frameworks and compares the history of national grid formation in Germany and Japan in the 1920s. In both countries, foresighted engineers and entrepreneurs noticed the necessity of a unified national grid—something we see from the case study of Matsunaga Yasuzaemon and Arthur Koepchen. However, government policy in Japan regarding frequency unification was inconsistent, whereas the German provincial governments set up clear visions for grid construction. Moreover, Japanese ideology of the day preferred market competition, whereas in Germany electric utilities coordinated with each other. For Germany, the 1920s heralded the beginning of a European grid, whereas Japan's bifurcated frequency standard hindered the formation of a unified national grid. And Japan's split grid can even result in the electric power system's fragility in the face of natural disasters such as the Great East Japan Earthquake of March 2011.
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The history of Japan's electrification encompasses both the miraculous and the puzzling. William Edward Ayrton (1847–1908), the world's first professor of electrical engineering, taught in Japan from 1873 to 1878 (Takahashi Citation1990; Uchida Citation1991). Thanks to his dedication, the educational level of Japanese electric engineering has been estimated to be among the highest in the world ever since (Okochi and Uchida Citation1980: 135–136). Japan's earliest electric utility, Tokyo Electric Light (forerunner of today's Tokyo Electric Power, or Tepco), was set up in 1883, about the same time as other advanced countries such as Britain, Germany, and the USA. In 1889, engineer Tanabe Sakuro 田辺朔郎 (1861–1944), still in his twenties, designed Asia's first hydroelectric power station, in Kyoto (Tanabe Citation1894). Before the First World War, Japan pioneered high voltage alternating current (hereafter HVAC) transmission and constructed a system using 115 kV, the highest voltage in the world except for the USA at the time (Hausman, Hertner, and Wilkins Citation2008: 20–21). The proportion of households using electric power in Japan had already reached 89 percent by 1935, making Japan one of the most electrified countries on earth (Kurihara Citation1964: 181). These achievements were miraculous for a latecomer to industrialization. There is little wonder that technology historian Thomas Hughes (Citation1983) mentioned in the preface to Networks of Power that he would have wished to study Japan had he known the Japanese language.
