Nationalism and Japanese Science during the Pacific War

In the London Times Literary Supplement for 18 & 25 December there is a review by Julia Adeney Thomas, a Notre Dame history professor, of a new book by Hiromi Mizuno, Science for the Empire: scientific nationalism in modern Japan, published by Stanford UP. It casts light on an unfamiliar and surprising subject: the severe restrictions placed on Japanese scientists by the military government before and during the war. Everyone knows how rapidly and effectively Japan has assimilated (and improved upon) Western science and technology ever since the beginning of the Meiji Era, culminating in the spectacular technological innovations (in automobiles, VHS recorders, computers, etc.) that transformed Japan into an economic powerhouse at the end of the twentieth century. But before and during the war, the Japanese government undertook a quest to "overcome" science (i.e., Western science). The military government objected to the universality of science and to its European origins. They wanted Japanese scientists to develop a science that was purely and uniquely Japanese. At a 1942 Kyoto conference on the "science problem," physicist Kikuchi Musashi, when pressed for a response, said, "I do feel science needs to be overcome, but I have no idea how."

Mizuno notes that before and during the war Japanese scientists were second-class citizens in the eyes of the government, overshadowed by the power and prestige of lawyers. (The influence of lawyers at this time can be seen in Akira Kurosawa's fifth film, No Regrets for Our Youth, in which the Kyoto University student who betrays his fellow anti-militarist radicals ends up becoming a powerful lawyer for the government.) Even though Japanese Communists and Marxists supported the universality of science, because they saw it strictly in terms of class struggle they were of limited help to the scientists. A vision of "pure" Japanese science was developed in which scientific rationality somehow emerged during the Tokugawa Era (when Japan became a closed society specifically to keep out new and potentially destabilizing ideas from the West). This vision was supported through a concept of "wonder" and promoted through popular science magazines and science-fiction stories. Despite the objections of members of the Ministry of Education, who feared that teaching wonder might lead students to question things they ought not to question (like the supremacy of the military), scientific wonder became part of the national educational curriculum by 1941.

What kept Japanese science from sliding into a temporary Dark Age of obscurantism (similar to Soviet-era official Marxist science) was, of course, the war itself, which demanded the rapid production of effective technology, as wars tend to do.

The review is comprehensive and opinionated (as TLS reviews usually are) and it is nicely illustrated by a color photograph of a samurai warrior robot built by Crafthouse and displayed at the Tokyo International Robot Exhibition of November 2009. (The robot looks quite humanoid, more so than the cute Robena the robot we saw at Toyota headquarters in Nagoya during the 2008 NCTA Summer Study Tour.)

Leigh Clark
Monroe High School[Edit by="lclark on Dec 31, 10:23:54 AM"][/Edit]