The land-survey expedition conducted by Ino Tadataka over all parts of Japan during 1800-1817 was a monumental achievement in the Japanese history of scientific map making. Although almost all of Ino's diaries, field books and surveying instruments have long been preserved at the Ino Tadataka's Memorial Museum (Katori City), the sole missing is the meridian transit instrument for astronomical observations. Around 2003 a set of an old astronomical quadrant and a transit instrument was discovered, which was precisely produced and very similar, in terms of the structure, function and size, to the ones used by Ino at the Setonaikai district. The inscription recorded on the quadrant reads that it was produced in 1831 by Tatsunosuke at Karoto, a small harbor village of Kurahashi island near Kure city, with the help of an official astronomer of the Hiroshima han (fief), who was responsible for designing and inscribing the quadrant's scale. It is thus inferred that the two instruments were elaborate products which replicated Ino's ones by utilizing the chance when Ino visited Karoto in March of 1806. Hence the Tatsunosuke's quadrant and transit instrument are historically very valuable remains, the latter in particular, since it has been lost at the Ino's museum. The drawing "Yachu sokuryo no zu" preserved at the Irihuneyama Memorial Museum of Kure city has well been known by that this describes most vividly the practice of astronomical observations of the Ino's team with the relevant audience. Scrutinizing the historical local materials with drawings and explanations written in Ino' diaries that recorded his expedition near the Kure region, we have found it most likely that a local painter drew "Yachu sokuryo no zu", who attended the Ino's night observations at Karoto. Motivated by this finding, we made twice extensive interview investigations at Karoto. As a result we succeeded in obtaining a testimony from the aged widow of an old traditional hotel whose owner's name in the 1810s was exactly the same as the one written in the Ino's diary. We also found out that the location of the hotel coincided with the one expressed with an asterisk, as a site of astronomical observations in the Ino' large map of this region. Therefore, Tatsunosuke's astronomical instruments are important existence as central witness that combine the description of the Ino's diary, our findings at Karoto and the instruments themselves.

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AIKAWA Haruki, one of the prominent theorists of technology study in Japan in the prewar period, put forward fresh philosophical understandings of technology in the first days of the 1940s. He saw the unification of the subjective humanity and objective material in the dynamic process of production and regarded technology as a medium of such unification. By investigating his books published in the period of the Konoe's New Order, present paper seeks to reveal how Aikawa acquired his own idea on technology. It also aims to put the improvement of his thought in the sociopolitical context of wartime Japan. In the first half of the 1930s, Aikawa had a materialistic view: that is, he observed that the nature of technology was represented in the means of labor in itself. Although Aikawa's idea was accepted among members of the Society for the Study of Materialism as one of the possible Marxist understandings of technology, it was also criticized for ignoring the importance of the subjective labor force in the process of production. After his arrest as a suspected communist sympathizer in 1936, Aikawa abandoned his previous standpoint and came to be a spokesman of the war policy of Imperial Japan. We should not regard this alternating process as a simple conversion under the suppression of the Japanese militarists, however. Aikawa certainly made a compromise, but at the same time, he intended to develop his idea on technology by accepting criticism by materialists. In such a process Aikawa succeeded in making his thought a more balanced one.

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