Making STS Socially Responsible: Reflections on Japanese STS

It's terribly sad to have to announce that a leading historian of Japanese technology, Hitoshi Yoshioka 吉岡斉, passed away on 14 January 2018 at the age of sixty-four. Yoshioka is probably best known for his contribution as an editor and author, together with Shigeru Nakayama and Kunio Gotō, of the voluminous and definitive Japanese Contemporary History of Science and Technology series.¹ English speakers too will know him as a coauthor of English-language works on Japanese technology, along with Nakayama and Morris Low (Low, Nakayama, and Yoshioka 1999). Within the history of Japanese technology, he worked especially on nuclear engineering, and his Social History of Japanese Nuclear Engineering is the gold standard in the field.

Yoshioka was highly critical of nuclear energy and of Japan's nuclear policy, but he did not hesitate to take up various official positions and accepted membership in the National Commission for Nuclear Energy. Within the influential governmental advisory committee, he tried to take a firm hold on the reins of policy makers and the nuclear industry, self-defining as a "counter-technocrat"² whose function was apparently to change nuclear policy from the inside.

After the triple disaster of 3/11 in 2011, Yoshioka became more involved in the citizen's movement on nuclear energy, finally becoming a representative of the Citizens' Commission on Nuclear Energy (CCNE), a nonprofit advocacy, and chairing the summary of a revised policy advocacy paper in 2017 (Citizens' Commission on Nuclear Energy 2017). Regretfully, his commitment to the CCNE ended suddenly, and this became one of his last pieces of work.

What can those of us engaged in Japanese STS learn from Yoshioka; what are his lessons for Japanese STS? He was an excellent historian of contemporary technology, at the same time extending his analysis using the sociology of technoscience, and he was the most influential critic of Japan's nuclear policy. Toward the end of his life he became more engaged in the citizens' movement, facing as it then did the deadlock of the post-Fukushima landscape. Like his older mentor Nakayama, he also took part in various STS activities in Japan, and together with the leading sociologist of science, Miwao Matsumoto, he was a founding editor of the Japanese Association of STS Annual Journal for STS (JASTS, now the Sociology of Science Society of Japan). Yoshioka was also happy to host the last annual meeting of the Japanese Society for STS (JSSTS) in November 2017 at Kyushu University, where he was a former vice president.³ He was due to give the keynote speech at Kyushu, but most unfortunately was unable to deliver this because he had become seriously ill and was already hospitalized. For most of us, any chance of meeting him had passed, and we know now that we shall miss him forever.

One thing we should note is that, although Yoshioka supported and actively participated in STS research activities and organization, he did not offer a free hand to the discipline and to Japan's particular STS practice: when it came to STS, he was as critical as when discussing nuclear energy.

And then there are his analysis of and remarks on the specific academic style of Japan's STS, within which he discerned four characteristics. I myself shall never forget Yoshioka's presentation of his analysis at the 2016 annual STS conference in Sapporo. He explained why Japanese STS-ers were not at all influential, especially after the 3/11 disasters: Japanese STS-ers, he argued, were for the most part unremarkable in their academic contributions, their sociopolitical effects as public intellectuals were limited and ineffective. There were, he said, four reasons for this. First, Japanese STS-ers were reluctant to become interested parties in any socially controversial issues. Unlikely to be committed to any social movement, they preferred to remain a neutral third party, trying to behave as if they were mediators in a conflict or communicators of conflicting issues. Second, Japanese STS-ers were not knowledgeable or fully informed enough to be involved and committed as a concerned party in social conflict. They were unwilling...