Morris Low

The University of Queensland | UQ · School of History, Philosophy, Religion and Classics

Exhibitions, films and the mass media had given the Japanese people some sense of what a reactor would look like but the opportunity to visit a reactor was afforded by the nuclear facilities under construction at Tōkai-mura in Ibaraki prefecture and elsewhere. Tōkai-mura became a sightseeing destination for special-interest groups and educators who...

This brief chapter reflects on some of the findings of this book in light of recent scholarship on visual culture, sensory history and anti-nuclear protest in post-Fukushima Japan. It argues that growing awareness of how the visual has been used to promote nuclear power has led to the emergence of “visual activism” and “cute direct action.” These a...

The dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima changed Japanese history. This chapter examines before and after the event. Even before, Fortune magazine was promoting the narrative that Japanese militarists were to blame for the war and used photographs to support its argument. The atomic bomb itself provided a highly visual way of ending the Pacific...

This chapter examines the efforts to shape a national narrative about the role of science and technology, including nuclear power, through key events such as the 1964 Tokyo Olympics and the 1970 Osaka Expo. Japan provided a developmental model for other nations in East Asia. North Korea looked to Japan’s introduction of the improved Calder Hall rea...

This chapter focuses on the crucial role of media coverage of the Lucky Dragon No. 5 fishing trawler incident in March 1954, a time when Occupation-period censorship had only been recently lifted. Newspapers such as the Yomiuri Shimbun and the Nippon Times, along with the illustrated magazine Asahi Gurafu (Asahi Graph) used photographs to give read...

Japan’s dream of introducing nuclear power became more real during the years 1956–1958. The period coincided with the extended absence overseas of the Hiroshima panels painted by Akamatsu Toshiko and Maruki Iri. Key figures such as media mogul Shōriki Matsutarō and the politician Nakasone Yasuhiro played leading roles in promoting civilian nuclear...

This chapter discusses the early history of the development of nuclear power in Japan. Not only did some influential Japanese commentators feel a sense of entitlement as victims of the bomb to exploit the energy source but also American officials and politicians felt that it would be an appropriately Christian gesture to assist Japan given what had...

In the 1950s, Japanese science-fiction films and documentaries portrayed the threat posed by nuclear weapons while nevertheless acknowledging the power of science and scientists to enhance people’s lives. This chapter discusses the American-made The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms (1953) and how it inspired mutant monster films such as Godzilla (1954). N...

In Japan, there were continuities between wartime image production and early post-war images of the devastation at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The artist Akamatsu Toshiko (later known as Maruki Toshi), illustrated patriotic children’s books during the war but would go on to produce what became known as the Hiroshima panels with her husband Maruki Iri....

This chapter explains how this book differs from other accounts of the history of nuclear power in Japan. It provides some context for understanding why it was written and outlines the chapters that follow. The book argues that public attitudes were influenced by visual representations and discourses about how civilian nuclear power was safe and an...

This article examines photographs taken by the American anthropologist John W. Bennett during the Allied Occupation of Japan. Bennett was Chief of the Public Opinion and Social Research Division of the Civil Information and Education Section of the Supreme Commander of the Allied Powers. In his photographs, Japanese women can be seen fraternising w...

This paper outlines the emergence of eco-cities in Japan from a much needed historical perspective. Since Japan's rapid industrialization in the late nineteenth century, there has been an emphasis on economic growth at all costs. Despite the introduction of the concept of the Garden City in Japan in the early twentieth century, industrialization co...

NakayamaShigeru, Science, technology and society in postwar Japan, Japanese Studies Series, London and New York, Kegan Paul International, 1991, pp. xv, 259, £45.00 (0-7103-0428-5). - Volume 36 Issue 4 - Morris F. Low

In this paper I examine the quest by physical anthropologists in Japan for the origins of the Japanese. A major focus of this research has been the Ainu people of the northern island of Hokkaidō, who have recently been declared an indigenous people of Japan. The relationship between mainstream Japanese and the very much living community of the Ainu...

How did the availability (or lack of) research support systems for science in Japan influence the activities of physicists after World War II? To understand how physicists negotiated the landscape of postwar Japan, we need to examine their wartime experience. Only then can we understand the general disdain on the part of many scientists (and many J...

In the Edo period (c. 1600-1868), exposure to Western art, science and technology encouraged Japanese 'ukiyo-e' (pictures of the floating world) artists to experiment with Western perspective in woodblock prints and book illustrations. We can see its early influence in the work of Utagawa Hiroshige (1787-1858), as well as Utagawa Kuniyoshi (1797-18...

This paper examines how Gotō Shinpei (1857-1929) sought to develop imperial networks emanating out of Tokyo in the fields of public health, railways, and communications. These areas helped define colonial modernity in the Japanese empire. In public health, Gotō's friendship with the bacteriologist Kitasato Shibasaburō led to the establishment of an...

The field of the history of Japanese science is at a crossroads. By working with STS scholars, promoting interaction with the Asian region and beyond, the field can be reinvigorated. This paper outlines the current situation and identifies key institutions and players who will lead the field into the twenty-first century.

There has long been a tension between tradition and modernity in Japan. We can see this tension at work in the relationship between technology and culture. Since the 19th century, this has been articulated in the slogan 'wakon yōsai' ('Japanese spirit, Western technology'). This chapter argues that this dualism allows the Japanese to create a space...

The Sakata model was but one aspect of Shoichi Sakata's life and achievements. To better understand the context in which the model was developed, this paper outlines various aspects of his career, from family background and education, scientific work, friendship with Mituo Taketani, involvement in policymaking, and role of the Elementary Particle T...

Sixty years on from the end of the Pacific War, Japan on Display examines representations of the Meiji emperor, Mutsuhito (1852-1912) and his grandson the Showa emperor, Hirohito who was regarded as a symbol of the nation, in both war and peacetime. Much of this representation was aided by the phenomenon of photography. The introduction and develop...

The destruction of Japan's cyclotrons by Occupation Forces after the Pacific War resulted in a major setback for experimental physics in that country. Key figures such as Yoshio Nishina, Sin-itirô Tomonaga, and Ryôkichi Sagane strived to help Japan rebuild its scientific infrastructure and regain some of its former eminence in the field, but in the...

Laura Hein provides a detailed, scholarly account of the lives and ideas of six Japanese economists: Ōuchi Hyōe (1888–1980) and five of his students. In what amounts to a collective biography, Hein traces how they were politically active and sought to influence public policy in Japan from the 1920s to the 1980s.

This book highlights the importance of individuals in the shaping of postwar Japan by providing an historical account of how physicists constituted an influential elite. An history of science perspective provides insight into their role, helping us to understand the hybrid identity of Japanese scientists, and how they reinvented not only themselves...

Without Abstract

In September 1945, the young physicist Satio Hayakawa joined a group headed by Osamu Minakawa (Central Meteorological Bureau) and Ryōkichi Sagane (Tokyo University) to inspect the impact of the atomic bomb at Nagasaki. Hayakawa’s job was to measure radioactivity.1 The American physicist Richard P. Feynman whom he would later befriend, had worked on...

When the atomic bomb was dropped on Nagasaki on August 9, 1945, an anonymous letter addressed to Ryōkichi Sagane was attached to three recording instruments that were parachuted by the Americans.1 The handwritten letter implored Sagane to do your utmost to stop the destruction and waste of life which can only result in the total annihilation of all...

In 1954, the U.S. Information Service (USIS) produced the film “The Yukawa Story,” which was based on the life of the Nobel Prize-winning physicist Hideki Yukawa who had recently worked in the United States and returned to Japan to great acclaim. Narrated by one of his two sons, Takaaki, the film documented the life and work of Yukawa. Takaaki rela...

We saw, in chapter 1, how the Japanese physicist was shaped by both social and cultural factors. Indeed, the samurai “spirit” can be considered a cultural resource, a construct, which Japanese used in both peacetime and in war. World War II provides a useful window to how physicists negotiated their multiple identities and sometimes conflicting loy...

The image of a hi-tech samurai has often been invoked to describe Japan’s post-World War II economic success. But such references to the role of Japan’s warrior class go back to the beginning of the twentieth century. “Scratch a Japanese of the most advanced ideas, and he will show a samurai”1—so wrote Inazō Nitobe in his classic text, Bushido: The...

Jean-Jacques Salomon has written that throughout the world, at the end of the war, the demobilization of researchers, far from signalling the end of “mobilized” science as such, gave rise, on the contrary, to systematic efforts to take advantage of research activities in the context of “national and international objectives.”1

As in wartime Japan, postwar scientists were asked to subordinate their individual freedom to conduct research for the interests of the much larger group—the nation. This was a source of continuing conflict. Despite Nishina’s call for science to first help revitalize the Japanese economy, Shōichi Sakata and Mituo Taketani responded by arguing for r...

With Japan’s defeat in the Pacific War, people spoke of the need to build a New Japan. While there was widespread horror at the devastation caused by the dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, there was also awe at the harnessing of science to cause such destruction. Whereas conservative politicians such as Yasuhiro Nakasone yearne...

For download and more bibliography see: http://pharmgesch-bs.de/?id=33 The history of human experimentation in the twelve years between Hitler's rise to power and the end of the Second World War is notorious in the annals of the twentieth century. The horrific experiments conducted at Dachau, Auschwitz, Ravensbrueck, Birkenau, and other National S...

This paper explains how, in the aftermath of World War II, a type of techno-nationalism emerged that linked being Japanese to science and technology and the increased consumption of electrical appliances. By closely examining official exhibitions, we can see how the state and private sector strongly encouraged this techno-scientific dreaming. Dazzl...

For most of the first half of the twentieth century Western imperial rule had stretched over most parts of South and Southeast Asia—British rule in South Asia, Malaya, Singapore and North Borneo; Dutch in Indonesia; French in Indochina; American in the Philippines.

PAUL W. LEWIS and BAI BIBO (PIU BO), compilers. Haqniq Doqtnoq Doq'yul. Hani Sayings. Kunming: Yunnan Nationalities Press, 1999. RMB25, paper.ANDREW COBBING (based on an original study by Inuzuka Takaaki). The Satsuma Students in Britain: Japan's Early Search for the ‘Essence of the West’. Richmond, Surrey: Curzon, 2000. 201 pp. Introduction, plate...

SHARON KINSELLA. Adult Manga: culture and Power in Contemporary Japanese Society. Richmond, Surrey: Curzon Press, 2000. xii, 228 pp. £12.99, paper.STEPHEN ESKILDSEN. Asceticism in Early Taoist Religion. Albany, NY: State University of New York, 1998. vii, 229 pp. US$19.85, paper.H. A. J. KLOOSTER. Bibliography of the Indonesian Revolution, Publicat...

There have been two Japanese Nobel laureates in chemistry, three in physics, and one in the category of medicine or physiology. This relatively small number has been attributed to shortcomings in Japanese science. The award of the Physics Prize in 1949 to Hideki Yukawa and to his colleague Sin''itir Tomonaga in 1965 gave public evidence of how Japa...

BEGINNING OVER FIFTY years ago, with the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, Japanese physicists struggled to establish a type of civil society. They turned to science as a form of world culture, a way to transcend nationalism and bond with colleagues abroad. Many were to prove influential as public men and policymakers. They became engrossed...

In this volume, we stress the political dimensions of deploying Western knowledge in Asia and the Pacific, exploring some of the linkages between scientific practice, theories of race and evolution, and political ideology. We are particularly concerned with the ways in which scientistic models have been translated into various social and political...

[FIRST PARAGRAPH] During the last decade of the nineteenth century, the Engineer was only one of many British and American publications that took an avid interest in the rapid rise of Japan to the status of a fully industrialized imperial power on a par with major European nations. In December 1897 this journal published a photographic montage of...

Japan has long led the trend towards privatization of Research andDevelopment (R&D). With the recent establishment of corporate R&Dfacilities overseas, this has become more international in character. Therelative impoverishment of Japanese academic science has only recently begunto be addressed by the government. Despite the neglect, there appears...

This paper examines the introduction of European anatomy to Japan via translated medical texts in the eighteenth century. It argues how detailed illustrations of the body found in the texts presented a new discourse by which to objectify and control the body, and new metaphors and analogies by which to view society. Inspection of bodily parts throu...

This paper provides a detailed account of the prehistory of the KEK National Laboratory for High Energy Physics at Tsukuba in Japan. Attempts to establish Japan's first truly national laboratory marked the beginning of ‘big science’ in Japan. An examination of the debate and decision-making processes, which spanned over a decade, provide insight in...

This paper questions claims that the Japanese may have succeeded in testing an atomic weapon shortly before the end of World War II. Historical and empirical evidence is examined which suggests that the lack of scientific expertise in nuclear physics hampered the development of an atomic bomb, the most qualified scientists generally being unwilling...

In recent years there has been a vast amount of commentary on the state of Japanese science, little of which has added to our understanding of its social role. This paper explores some of the models which have helped to structure the manner in which the growth of Japanese science has been depicted. While some of the models which are employed may be...