Riken from 1945 to 1948: The Reorganization ofJapans Physical and Chemical Research Institute under the American Occupation SAMUEL K. COLEMAN The development of science and technology in modern Japan assumed a unique trajectory because the country was far removed, geographically and culturally, from the West. Its government and industry imported Western technology in large volume during the years following the Meiji Restoration of 1868. In the early decades of the 20th century, Japanese research coexisted with technologies from the West as industrialists, pressed for a return on investments, continued to opt for proved products and methods. Successful assimilation of technology from abroad was no small feat, requiring impressive organizational skills and technical capabilities.' However, Japanese scientific expertise was not effectively harnessed to technological pioneering. As an American report published in 1953 put it: “the interpretation of fundamental science in the light of practical needs appears to have been sporadic and unpredictable, more chance than habit.”2 Scientists, supported by the government but ignored by the industrial community, gravitated toward “academic isolationism”—a disdain ofindustrialists and their goals.’ In the prewar years the scientific Dr. Coleman teaches in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Oregon. Research for the article was supported by the National Science Foundation under grant SES 8520956, with supplementary assistance from the Research Group for the Study of Postwar Japanese Science and Society (Toyota Fund). The author thanks Bowen Dees, Shigeru Nakayama, Kojiro Nishina, Alex Roland, David Swain, and Edith Sylla for their helpful comments on earlier drafts. 'See, e.g., William W. Lockwood, The Economic Development of Japan: Growth and Structural Change 1868-1938 (Princeton, N.J., 1954); Nakaoka Tetsuro, Science and Technology in the History of Modern Japan: Imitation or Endogenous Creativity? (Tokyo, 1980). (Japanese names appear surname Hrst throughout.) 2Edward A. Ackerman,Japans Natural Resources and Their Relation toJapan's Economic Future (Chicago, 1953), p. 550. ’Kikuchi Seishi, “Scientific Research,” inJapan, ed. Hugh Borton (Ithaca, N.Y., 1950), pp. 207-18.© 1990 by the Society for the History of Technology. All rights reserved. 0040-165X/90/3102-0002S01.00 228 Japan’s Physical and Chemical Research Institute 229 community had a severely hierarchical organization that favored senior ity and kinship connections. It also assumed an elitist orientation that spurned practical applications. There was one remarkable exception to these tendencies, however. The Physical and Chemical Research Institute (Rikagaku Kenkyu-jo), widely known as Riken, did effectively couple basic research activity with industrial applications. It became, in the words of former Minister of Education Nagai Michio, “the institution that has done more to advance creative research than any other single organization in modern Japanese history.”4 At the end of World War II, Riken’s fate rested in American hands. The Allies were either unconcerned with—or were openly opposed to—strengthening Japan’s scientific and technical capabilities. Riken survived the occupation period, but it underwent a radical transfor mation in the process. This article addresses how Riken’s fundamen tal research capability waned in the effort to sustain the organization economically under a radically new set of conditions. Origins and Development of Riken The initial stimulus for creation of the Physical and Chemical Research Institute came from Japan’s scientific elite after the turn of the century. TakamineJokichi, the applied chemist whose accomplish ments included the isolation of adrenaline and the introduction of phosphate fertilizer to Japan, was particularly visible in articulating the need for a research institute that would lessen Japan’s depen dence on foreign science and provide a solid base that would defend Japanese industry from foreign competition. By 1914 other eminent scientists had joined the cause, which soon gained recognition and some support among industrialists, politicians, and bureaucrats. Dur ing World War I imports of industrial materials and machinery virtually ceased, dramatizing for the Japanese their dependence on European technology.’ The proposed institute’s mission was not clear-cut; the Ministry of Commerce and Agriculture and the Ministry of Education sparred over jurisdiction. The Ministry of Commerce and Agriculture pre vailed because the Ministry of Education’s performance in the field of science was then in disfavor among some politicians and because ‘Nagai Michio, Higher Education in Japan: Its Take...