Shōwa zenki no kagaku shisōshi 昭和前期の科学思想史 [Essays on the History of Scientific Thought in Modern Japan: From 1920 to 1960] ed. by Osamu Kanamori, and: Shōwa kōki no kagaku shisōshi 昭和後期の科学思想史 [Essays on the History of Scientific Thought in Modern Japan: From 1940 to 1980] ed. by Osamu Kanamori, and: Essays on the History of Scientific Thought in Modern Japan ed. by Osamu Kanamori (review)

The late Kanamori Osamu pushed against historical and philosophical boundaries in his extensive scientific writings. His recent series of edited volumes brings together a cross-section of historians and philosophers of science, technology, and medicine. Over the course of thirteen essays and close to a thousand pages, the volumes' contributors pursue the twentieth-century transformation of scientific disciplines in Japan alongside shifts in Japanese-language studies on the history and philosophy of science.

Three books are under review: a pair of Japanese-language edited volumes and a partial English-language translation of the first volume. Their titles offer trilingual glosses of themes in a chronological sweep: (1) kagaku shisōshi 科学思想史 in the early and late Shōwa period (Shōwa zenki/kōki no kagaku shisōshi 昭和前期・後期の科 学思想史), (2) l'histoire de la pensée scientifique au Japon moderne, and (3) the history of scientific thought in modern Japan.

In Kanamori's lengthy introductory chapter, the Shōwa reign of Emperor Hirohito (1926–89) serves as a shorthand (rather than a strict timeline) for a potted narrative of historical and philosophical science studies from the 1920s to the 1990s. The introduction touches on the 1930s activities of the Materialism Research Group (Yuibutsu kenkyūkai 唯物研究会) and the Kyoto School of philosophy, as well as the wartime origins of the Japanese History of Science Society (Nihon kagakushi gakkai 日本科学 史学会). It spans post-1945 linkages of science and society within groups like the Association of Democratic Scientists (Minka 民科), 1960s and 1970s critiques of the democratic potential of science and the rise of anti-pollution environmentalism, and the 1970s introduction of Kuhnian paradigm theory through Nakayama Shigeru. It ends with 1990s science-versus-humanities "two cultures" debates¹ and the turn-ofthe-millenium institutionalization of science and technology studies (including sociology of scientific knowledge [SSK] and science, technology, and society [STS] research programs).²

The introduction is a comprehensive bibliographic survey of Japanese-language science studies scholarship (Kanamori cites more than six hundred publications in this essay alone), but it is also a polemic. The post-Shōwa 1990s mark the start of what Kanamori sees as a decline in historical research on science amid the Japanese state's prioritization of contemporary technoscience. A key moment is the 1995 passage of the so-called Science and Technology Basic Law (kagaku gijutsu kihon hō 科学技術 基本法), which removed research focusing solely on "humanities" (jinbun kagaku 人文 科学) from its purview. Pointed criticism is reserved for what Kanamori identifies as an overemphasis on "direct social participation" in more recent Japanese science studies.³ "It is great to be 'useful to society,'" writes Kanamori. "The problem is that it is not easy to determine what is useful to society."⁴ Kanamori's way to rethink science, culture, and society is instead through the "original, complex nature of the history of scientific thought" (kagaku shisōshi ga honrai kakaeru fukusōteki na seikaku 科学思想史が本来 抱える複層的な性格).⁵

In an earlier edited volume, Kanamori put forth kagaku shisōshi as a translation of "epistemology," a field and approach that encompassed much of his earlier work on the writings of French figures including Gaston Bachelard, Georges Canguilhem, François Dagognet, and Michel Foucault.⁶ In that...