ABSTRACT
After Japan’s defeat in the Second World War, there were immediate calls for the building of a new Japan, a ‘scientifi c Japan’. In the August-September 1945 issue of the popular science magazine Kagaku asahi, Professor Okabe Kinjirô of Osaka University called for a new start in scientifi c research. He envisaged a Japan that could contribute greatly to a world culture (sekai bunka) by producing the likes of scientists such as Noguchi Hideyo, Nagaoka Hantarô, Honda Kôtarô, and Yukawa Hideki.1 It was in this context of the immediate postwar period that the emperor himself was promoted as a scientist. As Chalmers Johnson has recently suggested, an image of the emperor as a peaceful marine biologist was carefully constructed. This drew attention away from the wartime activities of the emperor and the Imperial Household’s role in the war effort.2 In Leonard Mosley’s biography of the emperor published in the wake of the Tokyo Olympics, in 1966, the monarch was portrayed as ‘a gentle introvert, scholarly and civilized man of peace who found himself Emperor of a nation bent on war and conquest’.3 He is described as having ‘found the courage and the resource, in spite of military fanatics and palace conspiracies, to outwit the plotters and end the war’.4
