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Taketani's Interesting Stories

So far I have presented relatively serious topics. But there are a number of funny stories about Taketani described in some of his many books; let me tell you some of them. (The source is Taketani's Social Responsibilities of Scientists, Keiso-shobo, pp.19-41, 1982)

Taketani's paper on the Three Stages was published in the Journal Sekai-Bunka (World Culture); this was a journal published by a group of young intellectuals from various fields, such as aesthetics, French literature, or philosophy. Taketani joined them; they tried, through their defence of culture, to fight against the Japanese imperialism which was preparing the invasion to China, Taketani recalls. But the police (we had a kind of Secret Police before and during the War) began to arrest members of this group in 1937, the year the Japanese army began the invasion. In order to avoid to be arrested, Taketani moved into Kobe, and he said: "Facing many chaotic difficulties of nuclear physics, Mach's idealism can show nothing to do, and it is even forced to deny theories; whereas we, armed with the theory of the Three Stages based on the dialectic materialism, are analysing these chaotic difficulties and steadily overcoming them one by one." (Notice that Yukawa's monumental paper was published in 1935, but Yukawa had nothing to do with dialectic materialism, I presume).

But alas, he was arrested (first time) in September, 1938; his "crime" was the analyses of quantum mechanics and of the development of nuclear physics, and the methodological considerations on Yukawa's meson, or the consideration on the Dialectic of Nature. He spent 8 months in jail; and a public prosecutor examined him and he was freed. He describes this incident as follows: "At last, in April, a procsecutor began my examination. I showed him a number of foreign journal papers in which our work* was cited, and appealed what important work we were doing. This had some effect, and several days later, the procsecutor called Mr.Yukawa, and by making him a guarantor, shelved my indictment and freed me." Let me add that Yukawa became a professor of mechanics of Kyoto University the same year, 1939.

*Taketani, together with Yukawa and Sakata, published a few English papers on the meson theory. See Vol.10 of Yukawa's Chosakushu (Collected Works), Iwanami.

Freed from jail, Taketani knew the news of nuclear fission for the first time. And a few years later, he began to do research on the possibility of atomic bomb by military mobilization. But he was again arrested in 1944, because a member of a group of engineers for discussing the problem of technology with Taketani was arrested and the police suspected Taketani's view on technology might be dangerous; Taketani was on the police file anyway. However, this arrest forced him to write a very important paper on technology. According to Taketani's recollection, the group in question was quite informal, discussing and examining the nature of technology, and criticizing the defects of Japanese technology, the weakness of Japanese military technology, etc.; they also discussed the inevitable defeat of Japan, with some analysis of the current state of the war.

He explained to the police that he was doing research on atomic bomb, and warned that if the United States were to succeed in making the bomb before Japan, just one plane carrying a bomb would suffice for destroying the city of Tokyo in a second! But the police never believed such a tale. However, all low-ranking officials of police were sympathetic to Taketani who got ill during the summer, and he was permitted to go home for treatment of the illness. He feared that America might have succeeded in making atomic bomb and appealed so to police and prosecutors. In the meantime, he read Potsdam Declaration in a newspaper in late July and judged that his fear was not premature. Ten days later, Hiroshima was smashed! He visited a prosecutor and told him that the bomb which destroyed Hiroshima was nothing but atomic bomb, and declared that Japan was defeated; astonished prosecutor gathered all colleagues in order to listen to Taketani's lecture!

[to be continued.....]

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šPhilosophy of Science in Japan 6

(c) Soshichi Uchii. March 28, 1998; last modified April 19, 2006.

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