Historia scientiarum : international journal of the History of Science Society of Japan最新文献

The U.S. Government's official narrative denies the effects of residual radiation which appeared one minute after the atomic bomb detonations in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. This paper explores declassified documents from the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission, the Atomic Bomb Casualties Commission, and others and shows that these documents actually suggested the existence of serious effects from residual radiation.

After colonizing Korea, Japan invaded China, and subsequently initiated the Pacific War against the United States, Britain, and their allies. Towards the end of the war, U.S. warplanes dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which resulted in a large number of Koreans who lived in Hiroshima and Nagasaki suffering from the effects of the bombs. The objective of this paper is to examine the history of Korea atomic bomb victims who were caught in between the U.S., Japan, the Republic of Korea (South Korea) and the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (North Korea).

Two atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945 brought the unexpected liberation of Korea from the 35-year Japanese occupation. Koreans therefore had a very favorable and positive image of the nuclear bomb and nuclear energy from the beginning. The image of the nuclear bomb as "savior" was strengthened during the Korean War when the United States openly mentioned the possible use of the nuclear bomb against North Korean and Chinese military. After the end of the Korean War in July 1953 South Koreans strongly supported the development of the nuclear bomb in order to deter another North Korean invasion. When the US government provided South Korea with a research nuclear reactor in the late 1950s, most South Koreans hailed it as the first step to developing their own nuclear bomb. This paper will analyze how and why the savior image of the nuclear bomb originated and spread in Korea during the 1950s.

This paper traces the roots of the image of the atomic bomb in Japan by investigating the various discourses on atomic energy and atomic weapons in Japanese literature prior to the bombing of Hiroshima in August 1945. Japan is a country that suffered an atomic attack and, at the same time, one of the countries that was engaged in atomic weapons research during the Second World War. During the war, the discourses on atomic weapons were not limited to the military or scientific communities, but included the general public, thus facilitating the creation of a shared image of the atomic bomb as an ultimate weapon. This paper examines how this image was created. This special issue deals with the comparison among different countries, but the purpose of my paper is to deepen this subject by illustrating the differences within a single country in different periods. This research aims to extend the historical perspective concerning the atomic bomb in Japan, and offers another way of looking at this both historical and contemporary issue.

The atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945 revealed the most destructive power to-date of man-made weapons. Their impact was so great that Japanese scientists thought that a bigger disaster could be prevented only if war was abolished. Thus they welcomed the international control of atomic energy. It was, however, only after the occupation that the Japanese general public began to learn about the horror of these atomic disasters due to the censorship imposed by the occupational forces. The hydrogen bomb test by the US in the Bikini atoll on March 1, 1954 renewed fears of nuclear weapons. The crew of a Japanese fishing vessel, the "Daigo Fukuryu Maru" (Lucky Dragon No. 5) suffered from exposure to radiation from the test. Even after the incident the US did not stop nuclear tests which continued to radioactively contaminate fish and rains in Japan. As a result, the petition movement for the ban of nuclear trials suddenly spread all over the country. By the summer of 1955 the number of the signatures grew to more than one third of Japan's population at the time. Under the strong influence of anti-nuclear Japanese public opinion the Science Council of Japan announced the so-called three principles of atomic energy: "openness," "democracy," and "independence" to ensure atomic energy was used for peaceful uses only. These principles were included in the Atomic Energy Basic Law established in December 1955. With this law, military uses of nuclear energy were strictly forbidden.

This article explores how the Meiji medical authorities applied Western medicine-derived hygienic ideas and plans to build up imperial Japan. Although several medical historians have recently begun to investigate the important role that Western medicine played Japan's modern nation-building, there has been little historical analysis of how hygiene administration influenced military hygiene in this process. While some prominent historians of modern Japan have discussed the impact of Dutch medicine on the rise of Western learning during the Tokugawa era (1603-1868) or have placed it within the context of Japan's colonial expansion into Taiwan or China, they have not analyzed the process by which hygiene administration contributed to the development of military hygiene in the making of imperial Japan. In this paper, I will investigate why and how Japan's medical leaders adopted German medicine and the British hygiene administration system, and pursued their application to Meiji Japan's military forces.

In this paper, I examine the modern formation of traditional Korean medicine and discuss the characteristics of the modernization, or modernity, of the medicine. I probe for answers to three questions: first, prior to the twentieth century, what were the main factors that traditional Korean medicine needed to be transformed into a new one? Second, how did four states, the Taehan Empire, colonial Korea, North Korea, and South Korea, treat traditional medicine differently, and why? Third, what are the main characteristics of the modernization of traditional Korean medicine? In examining these questions, I found the following four factors to be important in shaping the modern formation of traditional Korean medicine during the twentieth century: first, the influences of Western science and institutions; second, the rise of nationalism; third, the economics of the state; and fourth, the effectiveness of traditional medicine. Among them, the introduction of Western science and institutions was the most important factor. All the different states in modern Korea realized that Western science and institutions were indispensable for the country to be a powerful nation and to enhance people's welfare. The degree of confidentiality in scientific Western medicine determined the number of traditional medical practitioners and their professional status. The modernization also was greatly affected by modern nationalism, which clashed with Westernization. Many Koreans and the Korean governments regarded the traditional medicine as something culturally valuable to protect from Western culture. Especially, the majority of Koreans who had experienced the cruelty of the Japanese rule under colonization tended to believe that Japan, a foreign ruler, had suppressed traditional Korean medicine as a liquidation policy of Korean culture during the colonial period. This belief contributed greatly to the recovery of the traditional doctors' prestige in South Korea and North Korea after independence. The economic conditions of the country also had an enormous effect on the quantity and quality of traditional medicine in the national medical care. Under poor economic practices, the traditional medicine never was isolated from medical care in the whole country, in spite of the pushing of the ideology of Western medicine. Particularly, since colonial Korea after the 1930s and North Korea after the 1980s were in very poor economic condition, traditional medicine played a more important role than at any other times. In South Korea, since the 1980s, has been making economic success in the course of industrialization toward an affluent society, traditional medicine is being treated as an alternative and complement to the weakness of Western medicine in the area of health improvement and treatment of chronic illness. The deep belief that traditional medicine had excellent effectiveness in this area resulted in this success. Like their ancestors, many Koreans in the twentieth

Natural science in East Asia formed a unique field of study called the study of shushu, which consisted of various fields of natural science and divinations derived from the Yijing [Chinese characters: see text]. Though the study of shushu is a field peculiar to East Asia where people want to evaluate the essence of the scientific culture of East Asia properly, it seems indispensable to grasp its structure and historical development. In this paper, the process of transformation of fangshu [Chinese characters: see text] in the pre-Qin period into shushu caused by the great thought revolution occurring in the period of Han period and its development in the Middle Ages are discussed. In particular, the origin of the theory of yinyang [Chinese characters: see text] and the five phases that is the theoretical basis of the study of shushu is studied using materials excavated recently in China. Using the texts preserved in Japan seen in the Wuxing Dayi [Chinese characters: see text] and the Ishinpŏ [Chinese characters: see text] the development of the theory of yinyang and five phases in the Middle Ages and its theoretical characteristics are discussed.

The village of Yunosawa, near Kusatsu town, Gunma Prefecture, Japan, existed as a refuge for Hansen's disease sufferers from 1887 to 1941. It was the only such place to maintain, to its final closure, self-government free from the pre-war State isolation policy. The aim of this study is to clarify the dynamism from the notion of "the protection from social persecution of leprosy patients" to the notion of "the defense of society from the leprosy patients as a source of infection". Herein, I will explain history of Yunosawa village and its relation to the shift in State policy concerning leprosy. In addition, I will demonstrate the value of a free medical-treatment area.