Abstract
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 Soul of Japan, first published in 1900 and then in a revised form in 1905, the year of Japan’s victory in the Russo-Japanese War (1904–1905). Nitobe, who studied politics and international relations at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore during the years 1884–1887, develops an argument, along the lines that “What Japan was she owed to the samurai.”2 He suggests that the samurai became an ideal for the Japanese and that the spirit of bushidō permeated all social classes.3
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Notes
Inazō Nitobe, Bushido: The Soul of Japan (Tokyo: Kodansha International, 2002), p. 152. First published in 1900 by The Leeds and Biddle Co., Philadelphia. Revised edition published in 1905.
For a fuller exploration of this, see Kam Louie and Morris Low (eds), Asian Masculinities: The Meaning and Practice of Manhood in China and Japan (London: Routledge Curzon, 2003).
Motoko Kuwahara, “Japanese Women in Science and Technology,” Minerva, vol. 39 (2001), 203–216, esp. p. 208.
Iwan Rhys Morus, Michael Faraday and the Electrical Century (Cambridge, UK: Icon Books, 2004), pp. 7–8.
Ray A. Moore, “Adoption and Samurai Mobility in Tokugawa Japan,” The Journal of Asian Studies, vol. 29, no. 3 (May 1970), 617–32.
Sharon Traweek, “Generating High Energy Physics in Japan: Moral Imperatives of a Future Pluperfect,” unpublished paper. A version published in David Kaiser (ed.), Pedagogy and Practice in Physics: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005).
James Richard Bartholomew, “The Acculturation of Science in Japan: Kitasato Shibasaburo and the Japanese Bacteriological Community, 1885–1920,” unpublished PhD dissertation, Department of History, Stanford University, 1971, p. 228.
Thomas W. Burkmann, “Nationalist Actors in the Internationalist Theatre: Nitobe Inazō and Ishii Kikujirō and the League of Nations,” in Dick Stegewerns (ed.), Nationalism and Internationalism in Imperial Japan: Autonomy, Asian Brotherhood, or World Citizenship (London: Routledge Curzon, 2003), pp. 89–113.
Masayoshi Sugimoto and David L. Swain, Science and Culture in Traditional Japan (Rutland, Vermont/Tokyo: Tuttle, 1989), pp. 224, 229.
Shigeru Nakayama, Characteristics of Scientific Development in Japan (New Delhi: The Centre for the Study of Science, Technology and Development, CSIR, 1977), pp. 8–9.
Thomas Sprat, “Sprat’s Criticisms of Artisans, 1667,” in Hugh Kearney (ed.), Origins of the Scientific Revolution (London: Longman, 1964), pp. 141–42, esp. p. 141. Extract from his History of the Royal Society (1667).
James Richard Bartholomew, The Formation of Science in Japan: Building a Research Tradition (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), pp. 18, 22–23.
Bartholomew, Formation of Science, pp. 23, 32–34. Quote (from Yukichi Fukuzawa) on p. 34 taken from Masao Maruyama, “Fukuzawa Yukichi no jukyō hihan” (“Yukichi Fukuzawa’s Criticism of Confucianism”), in Tokyo Imperial University (ed.), Tokyo Teikoku Daigaku gakujutsu taikan: Hōgakubu keizai gakubu (Tokyo Imperial University Research: Law and Economics) (Tokyo: Tokyo Imperial University, 1942), p. 415.
Andrew E. Barshay, State and Intellectual in Imperial Japan: The Public Man in Crisis (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), pp. xiii, 24.
See Shigeru Nakayama, “Japanese Scientific Thought,” in Charles C. Gillispie (ed.), Dictionary of Scientific Biography: Volume 15, Supplement 1, Topical Essays (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1978), pp. 728–58.
Bartholomew, Formation of Science, p. 133; Shigeru Nakayama, Teikoku daigaku no tanjō (The Birth of Imperial Universities) (Tokyo: Chūō Kōronsha, 1978), esp. pp. 34–71.
For details of this process, see D.E. Westney, Imitation and Innovation: The Transfer of Western Organizational Patterns to Meiji Japan (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987).
Shigeru Nakayama, trans. Jerry Dusenbury, Academic and Scientific Traditions in China, Japan and the West (Tokyo: University of Tokyo Press, 1984), pp. 219–20.
James Richard Bartholomew, “The Japanese Scientific Community in Formation, 1870–1920: Part 1,” Journal of Asian Affairs, vol. 5, no. 1 (1980), pp. 62–84.
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Eikoh Shimao, “Some Aspects of Japanese Science, 1868–1945,” Annals of Science, vol. 46 (1989), pp. 69–91, esp. pp. 74–75.
Hiro Tawara, Pioneers of Physics in the Early Days of Japan (Amsterdam: North Holland, ca. 1989), pp. 57–58.
Kenkichirō Koizumi, “The Development of Physics in Meiji Japan: 1868–1912,” unpublished PhD dissertation, University of Pennsylvania, 1973, pp. 244–47.
Erwin Baelz, Das Leben eines deutschen Arztes im erwachenden Japan (Stuttgart: J. Engelhorns Nachfolger, 1931).
Cited in Masao Watanabe, trans. Otto Theodor Benfey, The Japanese and Western Science (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1990), p. 125.
Susumu Tonegawa, “Questioning Japanese Creativity,” in Japanese, Kagaku Asahi (August 1987), pp. 51–75, cited in Watanabe, The Japanese, pp. 130–31.
Nakayama, Academic and Scientific Traditions, p. 51. For carpentry, see William H. Coaldrake, The Way of the Carpenter: Tools and Japanese Architecture (New York: Weatherhill, 1990).
For details, see Chikayoshi Kamatani, “History of Research Organization in Japan,” Japanese Studies in the History of Science, no. 2 (1963), pp. 1–77, esp. pp. 34, 38.
Eri Yagi, “The Statistical Analysis of the Growth of Physics in Japan,” in Shigeru Nakayama, David L. Swain, and Eri Yagi (eds), Science and Society in Modern Japan: Selected Historical Sources (Tokyo: University of Tokyo Press, 1974), pp. 108–113.
For further details of the Imperial Institute, see David Cahan, An Institute for an Empire: The Physikalisch-Technische Reichsanstalt, 1871–1918 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989).
See Michael A. Cusumano, “‘Scientific Industry’: Strategy, Technology, and Entrepreneurship in Prewar Japan,” in William D. Wray (ed.), Managing Industrial Enterprise: Cases from Japan’s Prewar Experience (Cambridge, MA: Council on East Asian Studies, Harvard University, 1989), pp. 269–315, esp. p. 274. Quoted passage in Kiyonobu Itakura, Kiyonobu, and Eri Yagi, “The Japanese Research System and the Establishment of the Institute of Physical and Chemical Research,” in Nakayama, Swain, and Yagi (eds), Science and Society, pp. 158–201, esp. pp. 191–92.
Tetu Hirosige, Kindai kagaku saikō (Reevaluating Modern Science) (Tokyo: Asahi Shinbunsha, 1979), pp. 181–83.
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Tetu Hirosige, Kagaku no shakaishi: Kindai Nihon no kagaku taisei (The Social History of Science: The Organization of Science in Modern Japan) (Tokyo: Chūō Kōronsha, 1973), p. 295.
David Kaiser, “Cold War Requisitions, Scientific Manpower, and the Production of American Physicists after World War II,” Historical Studies in the Physical and Biological Sciences, vol. 33, part 1 (Fall 2002), pp. 131–59.
Chalmers Johnson, MITI and the Japanese Miracle: The Growth of Industrial Policy, 1925–1975 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1982), p. 307.
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Low, M. (2005). The Making of the Japanese Physicist. In: Science and the Building of a New Japan. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781403976925_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781403976925_1
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