ABSTRACT
A full paradigm had been under construction in Japan since the late 1970s. The context was completely different from the post-World War II American idea of science as the endless frontier, “Big Science”—different also from the Silicon Valley phenomenon. It was born in the 1960s, at the end of the reconstruction period, when the Japanese state had to admit that industrial pollution was killing populations that were living in contaminated environments. At the end of the 1970s, the problem was to protect the Japanese economy and society from the rising costs of energy and imported raw materials. This period coincided with the emergence of a new general-purpose technology. In its initial version, this was computer science, automatization, and robotics, which Japanese industries fully assimilated. The project of establishing a high value-added economy based on successive waves of techno-scientific progress was born. The goal here is to describe the challenges inherent in the construction of a comprehensive national innovation strategy, the risks of competing with other innovation systems, and the constant institutional reforms required to undertake a reshaping of the economy through collective behavior. The presuppositions and consequences of the first version of the research and innovation paradigm are explained. This strategy was the source of the Fukushima catastrophe.
