Category: Nonfiction
Reviewed by: Mark Lardas
Title: The Islands and the Stars: A History of Japan’s Space Programs
Author: Subodhana Wijeyeratne
Format: Hardcover/Paperback/Kindle
Pages: 352
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Date: January 2026
Retail price: $140.00/$35.00/$35.00
ISBN: 978-1503644144
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Japan has one of the world’s largest space programs. While the nation has not yet launched humans into space, it belongs to the top six, along with the US, Russia, China, ESA, and India. It has also had more of its citizens travel in space than any other nation besides the three actually launching crewed missions: the US, USSR/Russia, and China.
Despite this, Japan’s space program is largely unknown to outsiders. This is partly due to language barriers. It also is due to Japan emphasizing unmanned space activities until the 1990s. Their accomplishments have not garnered as much attention as a result. Finally, the 1990s were a decade of failure for Japan’s space agencies, when the only news they seemed to produce was bad news. Japan did not discourage coverage so much as be grateful to be overlooked.
This book, one of the few English-language accounts of the Japanese space program, rectifies that omission. It follows Japanese rocketry developments from the 1920s to 2003, when several existing Japanese space agencies were merged to form JAXA, the Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency.
Divided into three parts (1920-1960, 1960-1980, and 1980-2003), the book examines the development of Japanese space exploration. The first part, “Child of War,” examines Imperial Japan’s use of rocketry before and during World War II and looks at the rebirth of Japanese rocketry in the 1950s. The second part, “The Institutionalization of Japanese Space Research,” follows the growth of Japan’s different space agencies. The third part, “The Challenges of Advanced Spacefaring,” traces Japanese space exploration to an apogee in the late 1980s, to be followed by a decade of failure in the 1990s.
“Child of War” spends two chapters exploring early Japanese rocketry. It shows the role rocketry played in Imperial Japan, psychologically and practically. Rockets were a way to demonstrate Japanese cultural superiority, a reach for the stars. It also played an important role during World War II, with the development of the manned Ohka rocket, one of the most advanced weapons of that war. But associations with Japanese militarism led to a complete ban on aeronautics and astronautics postwar. Even once the ban was lifted, Japanese scientists had to “demilitarize” space before the Japanese public accepted rocketry.
Part II explores Japan’s first excursions into space. It shows how Japan developed a decentralized space exploration approach, with competing agencies. Among them were the Space Activities Commission, National Aerospace Laboratory, Institute of Space and Astronautical Science, and National Space Development Agency of Japan. It illustrates how, unlike the US and USSR, Japan viewed space as a potential profit center, embracing the commercialization of space. It also shows conflicting attitudes towards space development by the Japanese public. While many embraced space, others objected. Some due to cost or opposition to industrialization. Others (most notably fishermen) because launches impacted their commercial activities.
Part III shows the growth of the Japanese space program. Its first chapter explores internal debate within Japan about the directions its space program should take. The next explores Japanese ambitions in space and how they led to difficulties with the US, which provided much of Japan’s leading-edge space technology and wished to discourage international commercial competition. It closes with a chapter on the disastrous 1990s, when nothing seemed to go right, and Japan’s space efforts seemed beset by one disaster after another.
The book is full of ironies. Japan was fully invested in peaceful uses of space when it restarted its space program in 1957. It wanted to avoid even the appearance of space militarization, understandable given the role rocketry played in the Imperial Military in the 1930s and 1940s. But Wijeyeratne shows how this led to odd results.
Associating liquid-fueled rockets with military use, Japan avoided indigenous development of liquid-fueled rockets in the 1960s, concentrating on solid-fuel boosters. Yet while the initial generation of war missiles, from the German V-2 through the Soviet Semyorka and the US Atlas and Titan, were liquid fueled, by the late 1950s most new war missiles being developed, including IRBMs and ICBMs, were solid rockets.
While a few Soviet military missiles used liquid propellants, by the end of the 1960s, the primary use of liquid-fueled rockets was putting satellites into space, not warheads on targets. That was almost exclusively the purview of solid propellant rockets, for both tactical and strategic purposes. Many of the liquid-fueled ICBMs and IRBMs were repurposed for non-military use as space boosters.
Japan, barred by domestic law from using its solid propellant technology for military uses, found itself behind the rest of the world in liquid-fueled technology by the end of the 1960s. To catch up, it licensed US liquid-rocket technology (initially the Delta) for domestic use. But licensing agreements forbade use of these rockets in the booming international market. It proved crippling to Japanese ambitions to create a profitable space program. Development of their first domestically developed medium-lift vehicle, the H-1, started late, in 1986. Development issues, largely due to an immature turbopump, delayed its deployment until it became uneconomical.
Similarly, because the Shuttle had military applications, Japan remained aloof from participation in the Space Shuttle program. Space agencies that did participate, including Canada and ESA, benefited, moving ahead of Japan. Instead, the Japanese flew as passengers and little else. While Japan became an ISS partner (building the Kibo module), it squandered much of the lead in space it developed in the 1970s and early 1980s.
The Islands and the Stars is a fascinating look at Japan and space. Anyone interested in space history or wishing to learn about Japan’s aspirations and achievements should wish to read it.
© 2026 Mark Lardas
