Science: Council in Japan

In the small, shabby auditorium of Tokyo’s Scholars’ Building, 210 of Japan’s best scientists relaxed last week with tall bottles of beer and box lunches of rice balls, cold fish and pickles. Like most Japanese, they wore cracked shoes and frayed trousers, but they had good reason to feel proud of themselves. This was Japan’s brand-new Science Council, democratically elected by 33,000 of Japan’s recognized scientists.

The Science Council was not organized nor even blueprinted by the U.S. occupation. It is an outgrowth of the dissatisfaction which Japanese scientists have felt toward the stiffly hierarchical science bodies inherited from imperial Japan. In the early days of the occupation, Japanese scientists, hungry for outside news and without faith in themselves, came timidly to the American authorities to ask advice. They got the minimum. “Form a liaison group,” said SCAP’s scientific division, “so we can talk intelligently.”

The Japanese went the whole way and organized from the scientific grass roots up. Probably no other country in the world has a scientific “congress” that is elected by popular vote of its scientists.

In its first meeting, the council heard from Physicist Harry C. Kelly, acting chief of SCAP’s scientific technical division. Said Kelly: “We here share the responsibility of reintroducing Japanese science to the rest of the world . . . We have learned to recognize only the external aspects of Japanese culture, but we know that you Japanese scientists have as much to contribute to us as we to you.”

Getting down to organizing themselves, the delegates proved that they had already learned a good deal about the facts of democratic life. They adroitly outmaneuvered the inevitable leftist clique and elected their officers by pressure-proof secret balloting. Chemist Naoto Kameyama of Tokyo University was chosen president. Second vice president is world-famed Physicist Yoshio Nishina, who wept when U.S. soldiers demolished his cyclotron.

In brief speeches the scientists promised not to repeat the “retreat from reason” that was forced upon them during Japan’s militarist regime. They pledged themselves to work for world peace. Then they split into committees and got down to their main business of advising the government on Japan’s scientific problems. Their charter makes them only an advisory group, but they feel that they have the prestige to give their advice authority. Besides, they have the conviction that they, the scientists of defeated Japan, are pioneering for the entire world.