This paper attempts to interpret the earliest Japanese attempts to digest quantum mechanics within the cultural context of the time. In the early 1920s, political, industrial, educational, and scientific landscapes in Japan were changing dramatically along with urbanization, democratization, industrialization, World War I, a huge educational reform, and a severe earthquake. Grown up in a radically changing world, Japanese youth began challenging old values and norms. Late 1920s Japan provided various loci for these rebellious youth: school riots, literary movements, modernist urban lifestyles, political activism, and new academic trends. Although science students were less political than other youth, they, too, had their way of rebellion. Having been stimulated by Einstein's visit in 1922, young physicists in the late 1920s were not satisfied by what the universities had to offer. Some recent graduates of Tokyo University found its physics colloquium boring and fruitless. Frustrated, they formed a study group and tried to learn by themselves something totally new. This splinter group read and translated papers by Heisenberg, Schroedinger, and other founding fathers of quantum mechanics, and published them in 1927. Similarly, around the same time in Kyoto, young physicists, including two future Nobel laureates Tomonaga Shin-itiro and Yukawa Hideki, began studying quantum mechanics on their own, a subject that no professor at the university could teach. For these young people in Tokyo and Kyoto, quantum mechanics was a harbinger of a new age, and learning it was an act of defiance, a revolt against their old professors.
This paper examines how Japanese physicists and other intellectuals discussed Niels Bohr's idea of complementarity from the late 1920s to the early 1940s. I claim that Japanese physicists and other intellectuals understood complementarity in heterogeneous mixtures of Japanese and foreign cultures and practices specific to the period. While some suggests affinity between complementarity and vaguely conceived "Eastern" thoughts, such a view would not justice to the richness of the cultural contexts in question. In contrast, my work takes an intimate look at the actual intellectual conditions in which Japanese discussed complementarity. I show how research physicists, physics teachers, journalists, Marxists, conservative philosophers, and science essay writers understood complementarity. Young research physicists paid less attention. A physics teacher saw in complementarity pedagogical value. Journalists saw Bohr and complementarity as good topics to write about after his visit to Japan in 1937. Marxists found it an offensive Machian subjectivism. The Kyoto School, a group of Japanese conservative philosophers, tried to appropriate it as a scientific vindication of their project to overcome the Western modernity, dichotomy of subject and object in particular. Scientific essay writers, or what I call "scientist-literati," saw complementarity as a nice subject to write literary essays on science. By discussing how various kinds of Japanese intellectuals understood complementarity diversely and what constituted interpretive bases of their understanding, this paper aims to capture the place of science in the society and culture of prewar Japan, and interactions between subcultures inside and around physics.
This paper examines how Japanese physicists and other intellectuals discussed Niels Bohr's idea of complementarity from the late 1920s to the early 1940s. I claim that Japanese physicists and others understood complementarity in heterogeneous mixtures of native and foreign cultures in modern Japan. While some suggests affinity between complementarity and what vaguely conceive as "Eastern" thoughts, such a view would not justice to the complexity and richness of the cultural contexts in question. People in various subcultures of physics and related areas understood complementarity differently. Young research physicists, too much occupied in catching up with newest developments of physics, paid little attention to complementarity. A physics teacher saw in complementarity pedagogical value, used in a textbook. Journalists saw Bohr and his complementarity as good topics to write about, in particular, after Bohr's visit to Japan in 1937. Marxists regarded it as offensively Machian subjectivism. A group of Japanese conservative philosophers, tried to appropriate it as a scientific vindication of their project to overcome the Western modernity. Scientific essay writers saw complementarity as a nice subject to write literary essays. People in different cultures debated over complementarity, crossed cultural boundaries, and stood in multiple subcultures. By discussing how various kinds of Japanese intellectuals understood complementarity diversely and what constituted interpretive bases of their understanding, this paper aims to capture the place of science in the society and culture of prewar Japan, and interactions between subcultures inside and around physics.
Western visitors to Japan are often amazed to see what they perceive as a strange mixture of advanced technologies and remnants of the Japanese traditions. How could Japanese manage to value scientific research and technological advancement, while appreciating and preserving indigenous values and norms?
This paper discusses how local native values involved in the introduction of scientific practices into Japan. In particular, it examines the moral background of Nishina Yoshio, the leader of atomic physics in Japan. He played the central role in the introduction of quantum mechanics into Japan and the formation of a competitive research tradition in this field. I claim that one can understand his activity as an attempt to reconcile two different sets of values: the native norms of his family and his hometown, with which he grew up, and the ethos of scientists in Copenhagen, where he was trained.
By examining Nishina's upbringing and his correspondence with his family, first, I show what ethical values Nishina developed in his youth. He shared the ethos of the Meiji Era, in which worldly success was a widely shared goal among the youth. His family situation and the binding force of the ie (household) system forced Nishina to seek to rebuild the Nishinas' family fortune. In addition, he shared his brother's bent toward nationalism. Then I turn to the examination of Niels Bohr's institute, where Nishina learned atomic physics, and Nishina's popular science articles, to show the moral framework that Nishina developed as a scientist. In Copenhagen, Nishina was struck by cosmopolitanism of Bohr's school, and impressed by rational attitudes of physicists working there, who did not care anything but ability to do physics.Finally, I show how Nishina, after his return to Japan, sought to reconcile these two sets of norms, through his school building activities in physics. The cause to rebuild the family fortune was translated into the higher cause of rebuilding the physics community in Japan. Nishina's obligation to his family was exempted, and the ethos of worldly success and nation building justified Nishina's school building efforts. This study implies far more than a biography of an individual would do. While it does not lend support to a nihonjinron style argument (for example, a proponent of nihonjinron might argue that there was something uniquely suitable for science in "the traditional Japanese culture," which does not follow from my study), it does show that the introduction of new scientific practices is not always merely a transplantation of new foreign cultures, and it can be a symbiosis of native and foreign cultures. A local native culture within Japan could facilitate the introduction of scientific practices in a certain circumstance. Scientific practices, even those in atomic physics, which was most recently developed in Europe, did not have to be "Western." They were not universal, but were able to cross cultural boundaries by picking up different meanings and values.
This paper aims to ascertain what "theoretical physics" meant in Japan from the late 1910s to the second half of the 1920s, during the time just before quantum mechanics began to be introduced there. I show that "theoretical physics" had dual meanings (a normative meaning and a "practiced meaning"), and how these meanings were rooted in the social and cultural contexts surrounding Japanese physics. By examining how "theory" and "theoretical physics" emerged in dictionaries, popular writings, and academic institutions, I show that the Japanese word for "theory" was strongly connotative of "philosophy," and that "theoretical physics" was perceived as a philosophical pursuit of "deep principles" in nature. On the other hand, examination of the works of those who were trained as "theoretical physicists" reveals that what Japanese "theoretical physicists" did was mathematical elaboration of known physical principles, rather than investigation of principles. I locate these practices of "theoretical physicists" within the "culture of calculating" that dominated Japanese physics, where physicists valued calculational skills and indulged in advanced mathematics. Physicists developed such a culture under disciplinary, social, and institutional constraints. First, physics in Japan was in a close contact with mathematics. Japanese physicists shared the same academic society with mathematicians at the universities, physics students received intensive training higher mathematics. Second, social demands also partially shaped the nature of "theoretical physics" in Japan. The technologies that were changing the modernizing Japanese life and landscape, such as electric engineering often required theoretical physicists to work out lengthy calculations. Third, the institutional inflexibility at Japanese universities, where little communication and cooperation existed between different specialties in the 1920s, did not induce young experimentalists to turn to theory nor did it encourage theorists to go beyond the domain of mathematics and to pursue physical meanings of physics.
From 1925 to 28, the younger generation of Japanese physicists challenged their elders and began learning new physics as a way of asserting their independence. The activities of these young dissidents in physics reflected the culture of rebellion among students in the '20s and '30. This talk is a story of how this particular culture of young physicists generated meanings and practices of theoretical physics in Japan.
In the early 1920s, physical, industrial, political, educational, and scientific landscapes in Japan changed, or were changing dramatically. In 1923, the Kantt Earthquake destroyed many buildings in Tokyo (including the library at Tokyo Imperial University), which created both a sense of insecurity in people's minds, and a more modernized Tokyo following reconstruction. The First World War had triggered a vast change in the industrial landscape, which was moving toward heavy industry. The democratization of imperial Japan, the so-called "Taisht Democracy" was reaching its high-point in the 1920s. It was also a time when higher education was being popularized, along with the inception of several new higher schools and the expansion of private universities. The development of heavy and chemical industry led to the founding of several new scientific research institutes, such as the Institute of Physical and Chemical Research (Riken) and Osaka Imperial University.
A more direct impact on Japanese physics came in 1922. On November 11, Albert Einstein visited Japan. Einstein stayed in Japan for 43 days, and gave numerous lectures in several cities. His impact on Japanese society and culture was great, and even greater on physicists and would-be physicists. Many popular physics magazines were founded to answer the sudden rise of interest in relativity theory. Einstein and relativity theory caught the imagination of young students, including ones who later became physicists, such as Tomonaga Shin'ichiro.
The social and cultural upheaval of this period produced radicals both of the left and of the right. Student radicalism was a dominant feature of university and higher school life, where the younger generation challenged old values and old thoughts. Many students were involved in social movements, and joined organizations such as Shinjinkai, a leftist organization which, seeking social reforms, later became radicalized.
Within the academic setting, the younger generation, frustrated by the stagnancy of the universities, began their movement. Although science students were relatively less political than others, they had their way of rebellion: they formed independent study groups. Having experienced the "Einstein Shock" in their youth, young physicists in the late 1920s were not satisfied by what the universities had to offer. In particular, the younger generations of physicists took the initiative of digesting the original papers of quantum mechanics at the earliest stages. For them, quantum mechanics was a harbinger of a new age, if not of a revolution.
In 1927 young physicists in Tokyo formed a study group, "Butsurigaku Rinktkai" (Physics Reading Seminar). They were mostly physicists working at Riken or at local higher schools, having just graduated from Tokyo Imperial University. The physics department of Tokyo Imperial University had a weekly physics colloquium, but it appeared to these eager younger physicists that it had degenerated into a mere formality. Discussions lacked physical content, and with the presence of senior physicists, young physicists could not speak freely. Frustrated, they decided to form an independent study group, choosing only those people who were committed to the freer atmosphere. Originally they did not intend to focus on quantum mechanics, but with such a motivation their attention was directed to something totally new, and something unknown to senior physicists. By 1927 major foundational works of quantum mechanics had appeared. This splinter group read and translated these works into Japanese, and published them in 1927 and 1928. These physicists freely changed details and sometimes even the structure of the papers, correcting at the same time mistakes in the originals. This means that they did not simply linguistically translate those papers, but they understood them, at least in terms of mathematics. But their "understanding" or the meaning they attached to quantum mechanics was conditioned by the local contexts. For them, learning quantum mechanics was an act of defiance, a revolt against the academic establishment, which included their own old professor.
Around the same time in Kyoto four undergraduates interested in quantum mechanics began studying it by themselves. They were students of Professor Tamaki Kaj{rt, a theoretical physicist who specialized in fluid dynamics, but who had little knowledge of quantum theory. Two of them were to become prominent physicists: Yukawa Hideki and Tomonaga Shin'ichirt.